


The Summer Walker

by LunaCatriona



Series: Black Water [2]
Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Children of Characters, Major Original Character(s), Original Character(s), Past Relationship(s), Self-Harm, Serious Illness, Some Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-19
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-01-20 01:43:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 60,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12422442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaCatriona/pseuds/LunaCatriona
Summary: "I watched her turn against the wind; another year begins its end; she held her time against the change; a people lost without a trace; a noble history, a place; a long road travelled on the line; another winter to survive; she walks with dignity and pride."- "Queen of the Hill" - Donnie MunroMalcolm's been landed with the only person available as Scottish Secretary. It's just inconvenient she's in limbo between two cultures, has a habit of switching between four languages, and terrifies everyone she crosses paths with - and that's just the half of it. Nicola Murray - still as politically competent as a half-dead cactus - is well and truly under his skin. Bella Whyte - his new torment of a Scottish Secretary - is the biggest contradiction of a woman he's ever met. Between the two of them, both with another winter to survive, Malcolm Tucker's got his work cut out for himself.Set about a year after my other fic, "Black Water." It would probably make more sense to read that first.





	1. Happy Birthday

Malcolm glared at Nicola.

“What the fuck is this?” he asked her. “This isn’t a fucking restaurant. This is-”

He stopped dead, and Nicola turned on her heel with that fucking grin that told him this was the start of a raging hangover tomorrow. “Nic’la, it’s fucking Tuesday!”

“It’s also your-”

“Fucking shut up,” he grumbled. He didn’t need reminded what day it was. Ella had managed to make him feel as old as the hills this morning, when she pointed out he’d been alive for half a century. Half a fucking century.

Nicola took his hand and pulled him inside the pub.

The music was loud, and all the familiar faces were there. Nicola’s team of incompetent fools, Julius Nicholson, Jamie MacDonald, the Prime Minister, the Scottish Secretary…the list went on and on. A couple of them looked like they dreaded his reaction. But the first thought that crossed his mind was: “Nic’la, who’s looking after the kids?”

“Oh, my mum’s at home with them,” Nicola waved away his concern, taking a glass from Jamie MacDonald; trust Jamie to hand her fucking vodka and lemonade as soon as she got to the pub. “Stop worrying!”

The progress Nicola had made in the last year was the best birthday present he could have asked for. Since that party the Scottish Secretary had for her thirty-second birthday in June – they’d all gone a bit mental, given it was the birthday party of the youngest Cabinet minister by far – Nicola had managed to keep sight of who she was. There were a few blips along the way, but by and large, she was living with losing her daughter and her marriage. He’d only found out in the fucking cruellest of hangovers that her divorce had gone through that day. Being officially disentangled from James Murray had helped her to heal more than Malcolm could ever have hoped.

He shook his head and took the whisky Jamie was passing to him. “There’d better be fucking food!” he shouted over the music to Jamie. “You know what happens when we drink whisky on an empty stomach.”

“Oh, don’t you worry, mate,” he grinned. “I got my Ma to take a few things down for you the last time she was here. Had to give the cook fucking instructions, the uncultured cunt!” he laughed. Malcolm didn’t ask – he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “Don’t worry – it’s just for you, me and Bella. This lot wouldn’t appreciate it!” he nodded to their English counterparts. He reached over the bar and pulled up a bottle of vodka and some glass bottles of Irn Bru.

“Aw, yes!” Malcolm exclaimed, downing his whisky. As Jamie poured him a double vodka and Irn Bru, Malcolm realised, “I am so fucked in the morning.”

Jamie met his gaze with a sense of false seriousness, and then grinned.

“Fuck it!” they both shouted, taking generous gulps of their bright orange concoction. It didn’t even taste very nice. In fact, Malcolm suspected anyone who’d not learned to drink in a Scottish town could never tolerate it. But it reminded him of home.

“Bella!” Jamie shouted as he poured another one. Bella Whyte, whose blonde curls were wilder than ever and who, for the first time since Malcolm met her, was wearing a wine-red lipstick, pushed past Terri and Glenn to get to her fellow countrymen. “Look what we’ve fucking got!”

Bella took the glass from Jamie, her face fondly reminiscent. “I’ve not had one of these since my step-brothers took me up to that old summerhouse on Kinnaird when I was fourteen!” she yelled excitedly. “Fucking hell, we were wasted, walking back along the Dun road!” she giggled.

The Scottish Secretary could hold her drink. That much about her birthday, Malcolm remembered. She’d drank him under the table and been fit as a fucking fiddle the next morning, while he sat in his office making dying fucking walrus noises.

The cook came out with a tray, on which were three bread rolls and a bottle each of ketchup and brown sauce. “Slice sausage?!” Bella shouted. “I’ve not had that in fucking months!”

“I’ve not had it in fucking years!” Malcolm said, grabbing one, and the bottle of ketchup.

“Aw, Malcolm, you dirty fucker!” Bella cried.

Malcolm looked down at her – all five feet of her – and saw her pouring enough brown sauce onto hers to drown a kitten. “Look who’s fucking talking! That’s just fucking wrong, that is!”

“Do we have to have this fucking debate _every fucking time_?!” Jamie groaned. “Just fucking enjoy it, would yous?!”

Malcolm smiled and took a larger bite than was strictly necessary. He’d been wrong to assume the worst. Yes, he was sure to pay for it tomorrow in the form of a hangover and some serious fucking heartburn, but it was more than worth it. The only problem was that it blew his master plan out of the fucking water.

He pushed through the throng to find Nicola after about an hour with Jamie and Bella; despite the amount of alcohol he’d had, he still had enough of his wits about him for his heart to be banging like a drum against his ribcage. When he found Nicola, he leaned in and kissed her hard. Her arms came up around his neck, pulling him closer. “Malcolm,” she said against his lips, “what the fuck are you drinking?”

“Vodka and Irn Bru,” he smiled.

“That’s just…” she began, but she couldn’t seem to find the words. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Scottish people are fucking weird.”

“Ah, but ye love me,” he reminded her, holding her tight to him.

“I do indeed,” she laughed. “Even when you’re fucking half-cut.”

He laughed, and put his hand into his trouser pocket. He was just about to take its contents out when Bella danced over to him. “Malcolm!” she bellowed. “Look what Jamie got fae his Mammy!” She handed him a Tunnock’s tea cake and a caramel log, and a macaroon bar. “Here, he said to make you try some too, Nicola, since you’re gonna be-”

Malcolm gave her a warning glare, and she quickly backtracked.

“Since you’re gonna be living with a Scot for the foreseeable!” Bella corrected herself, handing the same over to Nicola. Together they unwrapped the tea cakes and bit into them. Malcolm had almost forgotten how sweet the fucking things were.

“Fucking hell!” Nicola shouted. “No wonder Scottish dentists are loaded!”

Jamie joined them, and together they indulged in more sugar than they probably should have had in an entire week. “You fucking English don’t know what you’re missing out on!” Jamie teased. He was wasted. Utterly wasted. For every drink Malcolm had – and he was on his fifth in an hour – Bella and Jamie had another half on top. The difference was, Bella could handle it. Jamie most definitely could not.

The next song to come on started with the trilling of drums; it was a song that reminded him of Skye, even though it didn’t exist until ten years after he’d left Portree. “ _I still hear the snares in the Square, colours ablaze in the evening; the air was still down the Stormyhill_ ,” he sang along with it, grinning at Bella.

“ _It’s good to be young and daring_ ,” she joined him. She grabbed his hand and pulled him in to dance, singing all the way. “ _Beat the drum; beat the drum; like a heartbeat, lonely and strong, beat the drum_.”

How drunk was Malcolm? Was he really here, singing and dancing to Runrig with the Scottish Secretary? “ _I still see the blood on the knees; the caman swings without warning; the lads in white at the speed of light; it’s good to be young and daring_.”

“ _Beat the drum_ ,” Bella half-sang, half-shouted as Malcolm turned her under his arm, “ _beat the drum; like a heartbeat, lonely and strong, beat the drum_.”

Bella laughed and pulled Jamie in, nearly throwing the poor man to the floor, and Malcolm grabbed Nicola’s hand. “ _Across the bay, I can still hear the strains; the two-step loud and blaring_ ,” Bella sang. Christ, she was a force to be fucking reckoned with. “ _We walked hand-in-hand to the accordion band; it’s good to be young and daring_.”

Fuck it, Malcolm reasoned. He only turned fifty and got this utterly hammered with people he loved once. “ _Beat the drum; beat the drum; like a heartbeat, lonely and strong, beat the drum_.”

He turned to Nicola and took her by the waist and danced like nobody was watching them. Perhaps they were as drunk as he was, and really weren’t watching him turn his girlfriend in every direction to the sound of drums and bagpipes. “ _Beat the drum; beat the drum; like a heartbeat, lonely and strong, beat the drum_.”

Bella threw her arms around Malcolm’s shoulders, and Jamie tripped – Nicola had to catch him before he hit the floor. Malcolm, once Bella had Jamie by the waist, turned his attention to Nicola, drunk enough to be romantic and not give a fuck. “ _She was the pride of the summer that year; she was my sweetheart, my lady; we walked to Black Rock and we stopped by the Loch; it’s good to be young and daring_.”

The four of them were in a drunken circle – Nicola, for once the most sober and bewildered of them all – singing, “ _Beat the drum; beat the drum; like a heartbeat, lonely and strong, beat the drum_.”

That was, until Jamie lost his footing and put his elbow into a glass on the table behind him. Bella broke apart from them, and Nicola helped hold Jamie upright until they got him a seat. “Aw, naw,” Bella said, looking like she might be sick. “I canny handle the high colour, like,” she protested.

“High colour?” Nicola frowned, rolling Jamie’s sleeve up to check he wasn’t seriously hurt.

“Blood,” Malcolm answered for Bella.

Bella turned to him with an expression of surprise that he probably mirrored. She was probably thinking the same as him – how the fuck did he know that?

Jamie, it turned out, was fine. The glass didn’t cut him, and Bella calmed down fairly quickly after she had her ninth vodka and Irn Bru. How she was still standing, Malcolm would never understand.

He retired to a corner with Nicola for a while after that, his head light and full of music and friendship. Though it was his job to give everyone in this pub a bollocking on a semi-regular to regular basis – depending on their varying degrees of incompetence – they were the closest he had to workmates. Even they understood that, it seemed, or they wouldn’t be here celebrating his birthday.

And while nobody was harassing him – Bella was trying to convince Jamie another drink and Tunnock’s tea cake was a very bad idea – he took the opportunity to say to Nicola, “I need some fresh air, or as close to fresh air as you can fucking get in this city.”

The left, but Malcolm caught Bella’s eye as he left – she was trying to wrestle the tea cake box from Jamie, with limited success – and she flashed him one of her more terrifying smiles. He rooted around in his pocket and found what he was looking for while Nicola held the door open for him. “Oh, don’t tell me you’ve lost your fucking phone, Malcolm!” she scolded him.

He stumbled slightly, misjudging the slope on the way out the pub, and she caught him by the arm. “I haven’t lost my fucking phone!” he protested.

Carefully, all too aware of how much he’d had to drink, he knelt down. “Malcolm?” Nicola asked, holding him steady by the shoulder. “What the fuck-”

“Nicola Murray, you fucking jabbering, anxious, claustrophobic, ball of compassion and love,” he said in a rare moment of speaking from the heart, “will you marry me?”

He watched her face, wondering briefly if he’d done the wrong thing and sent her into a panic. But she didn’t panic. She smiled. “Yes.”

He grinned and slipped the ring onto her fourth finger, allowing her to help him to his feet. He kissed her, and drew her close for a hug.

They went back into the madness, and Malcolm gestured a thumbs up at Bella; she and Jamie had been the only ones who had known of his plan. She said something to the barmaid, who looked like she would have loved nothing more than to throw them all out. The music cut out and Bella shouted, “Right, lads! One more song and then we fuck off home and try to be fit for government in the morning!”

Her remark was met with a rowdy collective laugh. Malcolm was glad that they’d gathered only to dance, socialise and get drunk. No mushy speeches about how he wasn’t a bad person – he knew that would be them lying through their teeth for the sake of convention.

“ _When I wake up, well I know I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be the man who wakes up next to you_ ,” Bella shouted. It was easily seen she was the youngest person here – she was brilliantly full of life and absent of fear. “ _And when I go out, well I know I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be the man who goes along with you; if I get drunk, well I know I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be the man who gets drunk next to you_!”

There was no Scottish person on Earth who could hear those lines and not start singing. It was like it was imprinted on his DNA that he should grab Nicola and start dancing. “ _And if I haver, well I know I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be the man that’s haverin’ to you_!” he sang. Nicola rolled her eyes but beamed up at him, her arms draped around his neck. “ _Well, I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more, just to be the man who walks a thousand miles to fall down at your door_.”

By the time they practically fell out of the pub ten minutes later, Malcolm had one arm around Nicola and the other around Bella, Jamie continuing to sing _500 Miles_ as he stumbled up the road in front of them. He had sobered up enough to find a taxi and get home, but not much more. For one thing, he seemed to think he had a half-decent voice, when he was actually just shouting and jumping about like a fucking loony.

Bella was quite drunk, too, though not nearly as bad as Jamie, and not quite as bad as Malcolm. However, this was London, and she was a lone woman with a lot of drink in her, and his instinct was to make sure she got into a taxi safely.

Though Bella Whyte still scared him half to death, he had developed a strange sort of friendship with her. It was almost like he’d had to take her under his wing, knowing full well he’d bulldozed her into her job with little to no experience of the press – she’d been MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber, for fuck’s sake. The place wasn’t densely populated enough to make national news without some sort of major crime or natural disaster occurring.

When he got her into a taxi, she reached up and kissed his cheek. “Happy birthday, Malcolm!”

“Get the fuck home!” he told her, though in his drunken state, he couldn’t help but smile.

It was only when he was home that he realised it wasn’t nearly as late as he’d thought. It was only just gone ten. Ella was still awake, watching _Family Guy_ in the living room, probably knowing that she shouldn’t have been watching it. But Victoria took the same view as him – there was nothing in _Family Guy_ Ella wouldn’t hear from some immature twat in the playground.

His spirits high, he bounded into the living room and took Ella by surprise, picking her up and spinning her around one full circle before setting her back down on her sofa. She laughed and said, “You’re drunk, Malcolm!”

“Aye, blame your mother,” he smirked.

“Blame Jamie MacDonald and Bella Whyte!” Nicola exclaimed in mock outrage. “I had bugger all to do with it! Vodka and Irn Bru; have you ever heard of something so revolting?!”

“Don’t knock it ‘til ye try it,” he retorted, throwing himself onto the sofa with Ella, his arm around her shoulders. He’d created a bond with Ella; she’d had a shit year, and Malcolm was the one she turned to when she didn’t think her mother could handle whatever it was she needed help with.

Victoria shook her head in amusement, but froze when she spotted the ring on Nicola’s finger. “Ella,” Victoria said with a smile, “how do you feel about Malcolm being your stepdad?”

Ella looked up at Malcolm. “You and Mum are getting married?”

“Well, I said yes, so I bloody hope so after all that,” remarked Nicola.

Ella just lay her head down on Malcolm’s chest. She was a little like him; she didn’t always know how to verbalise what she felt, so she showed her approval in a more physical way. This proximity meant she approved. If she didn’t, she would have slammed the door and stormed upstairs to bed without a word.

“Malcolm,” Nicola said cautiously. “How did you know what Bella was saying about high colour?”

“Dunno,” he shrugged. “Must just be Scots,” he lied. He knew perfectly well it wasn’t Scots.

“It can’t be. Jamie didn’t know what it meant.”

There was only one place he’d heard that term used in place of the word “blood.” In the Travellers’ camp on Skye, that summer he’d spent there at seventeen, when Alec Stewart had manged to draw blood from Malcolm's nose while teaching him to fight. And the fact Bella used it so offhand, probably because she was too drunk to find the proper English word, told him that she had to be a Traveller. But he wasn’t going to say that to Nicola. If he’d learned anything from the Stewart family while living on Skye, it was that you didn’t out Travellers. It didn’t do anyone any good.

So he had to lie and say, “Maybe they have different words for things were she came from. She wasn’t just brought up on Skye, remember.”

That was the hardest part.


	2. Destruction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm unsure of this part - I'm not really convinced I did it the right way, but changing it now would only do my head in. So, yeah. Shit's about to hit the fan!

Malcolm sat down at his desk. He could have killed Bella and Jamie for this hangover. Well, actually, no. Bella was too fucking petrifying, and Jamie was in a worse state than he was. Malcolm didn’t know how Bella was seemingly perfectly fine; she’d had far more to drink than him, and she was half the size of him.

A knock at the door disturbed that thought, and the noise bounced around his aching head. Bella Whyte appeared, smiling mischievously as she strode across the room and into the chair opposite Malcolm.

She was beautiful, but not in any conventional way. Her bright, twisted blonde hair was completely out of control. If it didn’t suit her face as brilliantly as it did, he would have forced her to pin the whole fucking lot back before getting her photo done for anything. Those eyes of hers were far too fucking vivid for the average person to carry off. The blue pierced through everything and everyone it fell upon, a power heightened by the surrounding black eyeliner. Her lips were full and wide, over flat, square front teeth, with frightfully pointed canines at either side; when she smiled, she resembled a wolf stalking her kill. Short and stocky, with wide hips and thighs, her lack of height made her no less imposing. She more than made up for it with her uncompromising demeanour. When she spoke, she made little effort to dull her rough accent; he wondered if that was deliberate, coercing others to actually listen to her if they were to understand what she said, and not have to wing it. If he didn’t know her, he would have run in the opposite direction. And, perhaps, now he did know her, he was inclined to take cover under a desk if ever her fearsome features contorted into an expression of utter fire and fucking fury. He had never known anyone to be so simultaneously enchanting and terrifying.

Right now, however, she was in good humour, and was more enchanting than terrifying.

“Just thought I’d see what like the hangover is before the Cabinet meeting starts,” she smirked.

“Fucking horrendous,” snapped Malcolm as he opened up his emails. That was a task no hangover would excuse him from. “I’m too fucking old to be drinking on a fucking school night.”

“Aye, ye were fair knocking them back, like,” Bella chuckled. “Still, you came out of it engaged, so it can’t all be fucking horrendous.”

“I am _never_ fucking drinking with you and Jamie again!”

Bella burst out laughing; it was a sharp contrast to her speech – that normally gave her an air of impatience and a certain brutality even Malcolm would’ve struggled to pull off. But her laugh was musical, lingering in the ears ling after its departure. “Old man,” she joked. He glared at her briefly before returning his gaze to the email he’d been reading from the Guardian. He made a mental note to remind Nicola to never, ever speak of the fourth sector again. “Bed rest for you this weekend.”

“With three wee ones flying about the place?” he snorted, clicking the reply button. “Fucking chance would be a fine thing.”

“Better than my weekend,” shrugged Bella. “I’ve got an eight hour drive up to Dundee on Friday night.”

“Dundee?”

“Aye, my grandad’s no well,” Bella sighed. “He’s been asking for me, and this’ll be the first chance I’ve had. He keeps going on about wanting to tell me something. That’s what the nurse in Ninewells says, anyway.” Bella paused and then added, “Maybe he’s finally gonna tell me my dad’s name.”

“You don’t know your dad?” Malcolm asked in surprise. He’d always assumed, for whatever reason, that Bella had come from a family unit, particularly since he suspected she was a Traveller. They tended to be very traditional, secure family units. Tightknit families, partly because they could only trust one another.

“No,” she sighed. “Well, I do and I don’t. I know everything about him except his fucking name. Mum and Granny would never tell me, but Grandad always thought I should know.”

“That’s a bit…” Malcolm began, but decided it was best not to insult Bella’s family. “I’m sure they have their reasons.”

“Oh, they do,” Bella acknowledged. “And I completely understand it. Mum was really young when she had me. When she knew my dad, she was eighteen and he was seventeen. I think she just wanted to give him a shot at making something of a life for himself, you know?” Malcolm nodded vaguely, barely listening as he read an email describing how stupid Ben Swain was, like he was completely oblivious to the fact the guy was a fucking walking, talking defective pressure cooker.

Bella leaned back in her seat. “Mum always said she loved him half to death, but he was troubled. Angriest man alive, she says, but scratch the surface and you find the sweetest man you could ever meet. My uncles taught him to fight, to let some of that anger out. Seemed to work, because he let my mum in a bit.”

Malcolm, in all honesty, was just letting her talk. He had nothing to say, no experience of a comparable situation, but he could tell Bella needed to say all this out loud to someone who wasn’t her husband. “His dad had died the year before. Suicide. She says my dad carried that with him all the time. She reckons he probably still fucking does. He was up on Skye running from Glasgow, and I assume everyone in fucking Glasgow.”

Malcolm froze. He wasn’t reading anymore. He simply stared at the screen.

“He was trying to make enough money to tide his first year of uni over,” Bella explained, “so he got a job in one of the hotels outside of Portree. And when my aunt visited from Dunkeld, the five of them - my mum and dad, Alec, Hendry and Kathleen - got pished up by Scorrybreac. The pair of them – Mum and my dad – got arrested,” she laughed. “Drunk in charge of pushbikes, literally two minutes from the hotel. Grandad had to go and get them out. Still goes on about it.” She put on a gruff voice, presumably imitating her grandfather. “Drunk in charge of a pushbike! Moich tae the world, ye were, Bernadette Stewart. Moich tae the fucking world!”

His hands shook. He was pretty sure his whole fucking body shook.

“Fuck!” Bella shouted. “Cabinet meeting! See ye later, Malcolm!” she called on her way to the door. Malcolm gave a curt nod, not trusting himself to speak to her, or even look at her.

Once she was safely out the door and down the corridor to the Cabinet meeting, Malcolm stood up. He paced the room, not able to sit or stand. His body refused to be stationery.

Emotion rattled through his body like a gale, too strong for Malcolm to set each individual thought and feeling apart from one another. His hands trembled violently, and his head felt like it might crack down the middle. The room tilted, like it threatened to spin. Was this what a breakdown felt like?

There was nowhere for it all to go, and yet it could not be contained. He had no means of self-control.

And before he could stop it, his foot kicked the chair Bella had just vacated to the floor. It was somewhat satisfying to watch something fall as he felt he had done. His hands flailed, reaching out for something that wasn’t there. Everything he knew, he now doubted.

Did Nicola love him?

Could he be a good stepfather?

Did those three children love him?

Was he worthy of love?

What was his world meant to be?

Why had he let anyone in?

Why had everything just been blown to pieces?

How could he deal with living?

His hands tore books from their shelves, his feet kicking away anything and everything in their path. The finality of a hardback’s crash to Earth rang in his ears. One after another. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

“Malcolm!” Jamie MacDonald’s voice shouted over the noise. “What the fuck are you doing?!”

He ignored Jamie; he didn’t have it in him to speak. He did make an effort to calm himself, still having enough of his sense to know Jamie wouldn’t want to watch Malcolm Tucker in meltdown mode. So he poured himself a dram, and knocked it down his throat in one swallow. It didn’t have the desired effect at all. The burning on his throat only made him uncomfortable, and his hands shook even more violently.

He was lost. He’d not long found his place in this world, and it had just been pulled from under his feet.

It was this thought that caused anger to swell through him, and it was that anger that told his hand to throw the whisky glass through the air. It missed Jamie’s head by about three inches; Jamie ran towards him, trying to wrestle him still, and keep him back from the books and the files and the cabinets. Malcolm, however, was far stronger. He threw Jamie off with relative ease, sending the man flying back to the door.

The destruction in his heart looked something like the destruction on his floor right now. There was no sense to it, and no way to stop it.

“Somebody go to the Cabinet meeting and get Nicola fucking Murray down here! Now!” roared Jamie.

Malcolm vaguely registered that his fiancée would soon be in this mess with him, but it didn’t stop him throwing ring binders at the walls, tearing books to the floor, or kicking the small on which the whisky bottle stood to the ground.

“Malcolm!” he heard Nicola scream in fright. She dived across the room, quickly dodging the debris around her feet, and tried to hold him still, but if Malcolm was stronger than Jamie, throwing Nicola off of his body was like casting off a shirt. “Malcolm!” she shouted again. This time, she did not grapple with his body. She pulled his arms down to his sides and held his face tight, forcing him to look down into her face. “Malcolm, what’s wrong?!” she demanded urgently.

There was no fear in her eyes. He had forgotten that she had seen him fall apart before. She did not run from him, and he knew she never would.

The anger turned to panic, to the sheer anxiety he knew Nicola felt every time she was forced onto a train, or even considered using a lift. He knew what that feeling was now, and he didn’t think he was any better for knowing it.

It was possible to know too much.

His chest turned to stone, preventing his lungs from deflating. They were going to burst under the pressure. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and no way he could fight what was coming. “Breathe, Malcolm,” Nicola implored him. “Relax your chest. Let your diaphragm get the air out.”

He pushed the air out, a little at a time, replacing it with less each time he inhaled; he only managed it by watching Nicola’s chest move, letting her breathing guide his. He became more aware of where he was and with whom – Jamie lurked in the corner, looking both scared and concerned. He could feel the gold of Nicola’s engagement ring against his jaw, her thumb stroking his cheek as he slowly calmed down. Her eyes met his, searching for the reason he did this.

Lost in her face, the anger and panic dissipated to be replaced with love.

Love that had nowhere to go.

It pulled all the energy from him. His legs refused to hold his weight.

Malcolm fell to his knees.

Nicola pulled him in, his head against her abdomen as she caressed his hair. He didn’t care that she saw this – she had seen him lose his composure before – and he honestly could not bring himself to give a single fuck about what Jamie MacDonald saw. The world was too broken, too far out of control, for that to matter at all. There was no way forward, no way out of it, no way around it…so what did it matter?

He could neither lie nor tell the truth, for both had the potential to inflict damage he could never undo.

A lump developed in his throat; he didn’t try to swallow it. He just let it escape. He allowed the tears to fall.

Nicola sank to her knees, her hands reaching out for his face once more. “What is it, Malcolm?” she asked him. “What the fuck has done this to you?”

He shook his head. There was no way he could say it. How could he? It was ludicrous. Fucking insane.

Nicola sighed. “Oh, my darling,” she smiled sadly at him. She pressed a kiss into his lips and pulled him into a bone-crushing hug; her capacity for compassion and her lack of judgement amazed him. She did not hate him for breaking. She did not tell him to sort himself out. No. Nicola Murray did not do that to him. She hated toxic masculinity, the idea that men had to take the world and its ugliness without getting emotional.

That was why his fiancée was more than content to let him cry into her neck, rubbing his back and hushing him gently all the while.


	3. Normal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the furthest I had any drafts for, so future updates may be slightly slower!

“What the fucking hell was that all about today?!” Nicola attacked Malcolm when she got in the door. She had taken the children out to get the makings of the cake she had promised to make with Ben at the weekend, and so arrived home later than Malcolm did.

Malcolm didn’t answer her. If he answered her with a lie, they would only end up fighting. Answering her with the truth wasn’t even an option. It had to be silence.

He barely said two words the rest of the night. Even the children, who normally adored him even when he was less than patient, gave him a wide berth. Apart from Sophie. She, it seemed, wasn’t fazed by his silence. It was all he could do not to start drinking; he would not do that to Nicola. However, he had to acknowledge that if she were not there and engaged to him, he would have been passed out on the sofa with a bottle in his hand by now.

His mood broke slightly when Sophie came up onto the sofa on which he lay on his side watching television; she decided she was going to lie down with him. Though she was ten years of age, she still had that innocence of a much younger child. She needed a lot of understanding, a lot of hugs, a lot of reassurance. She was probably more like her mother than Ella and Ben were.

He sighed and put his arm around her stomach, holding her close to him. “Are you and Mum still getting married?” Sophie asked.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Yeah, we’re still getting married, lass.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m in a bit of a weird mood,” he explained to her. “But you’re not to worry, okay? It’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong, and neither did Ben, Ella or your mum.”

He drifted off to sleep, still cuddling Sophie.

When he woke, she was still there, though the room was dark. Everyone else must have gone to bed. He checked the time on his phone – it was after midnight. With a groan, he got up and carried Sophie up the stairs, putting her into bed without waking her up.

He changed into pyjamas and quietly got into bed with Nicola, careful not to disturb her. She didn’t deal well with being deprived of sleep. “Malcolm?” she asked as he put his head on the pillow. He closed his eyes, not in the humour for a late-night interrogation.

“Nic’la, please. Just fucking don’t.”

“I’m not going to drag it out of you,” Nicola said. “You’ll tell me when you’re ready. I know that. I just need to know you’ll still be...you’ll still be my husband. When the time comes for us to get married, I mean. Whatever it is, don’t let it break us up.”

He turned over and reached through the dark for her body. When he kissed her, he realised he needed her. Whether she ever found out the truth or not, he needed her if he had any hope of living with it. “Nothing will change,” he promised her, speaking between kisses that grew in urgency. “I’m still me. I just…felt too much.”

“Well,” Nicola mumbled. He was aware that she knew him inside and out by now, and so knew when he was telling her half-truths. “Whenever you’re ready, I’m listening.”

He kissed her neck, fumbling to pull off her nightdress. With a shot of discomfort, he noted that he was doing exactly what Nicola had done a year beforehand; he was trying to use sex to hide his feelings from her. The only difference was that she had the empathy to know it, and in every touch, she felt what he felt. He feared that rather than burying everything, he may have let her in on the secret of how helpless he really felt. Her hands were far gentler than usual, like she was afraid of breaking him.

“I love you, Malcolm.”

* * *

 

They didn’t speak of it for weeks. In fact, Malcolm acted like it had never happened.

Bella came back from Dundee with no answers, and her grandfather recovered from the infection that put him in Ninewells. Everything went back to normal, except Malcolm. He found himself carefully calculating every exchange he had with Bella; he tried to distance himself, paranoid that she might figure everything out for herself, but tried to keep a close enough proximity to prevent her from wondering why he was keeping her at arm’s length.

He wasn’t doing it very well. More than once, Bella had asked him if she had done anything to offend him.

He avoided the subject with Nicola and with Jamie. Nicola hadn’t asked since the day he trashed his office; she had stuck to her belief that it would all come out when he was ready for it. Jamie had asked the next day if Malcolm was alright. Malcolm promised Jamie he would be okay, and nothing more was said about it, though Jamie still kept a closer eye on him than he would have liked.

But that soon enough went to shit. One bleak Tuesday just before Christmas, Malcolm discovered that the previous night, Nicola had fucked up.

“I do think Mrs. Murray’s comments last night were misguided, not malicious. I know Nicola Murray very well, and she’s a lovely woman, and she generally does not judge anyone, but on this occasion, she does appear to have fallen into the trap most people seem to. Like most, she has passed comment on a subject about which she probably knows very little,” Bella Whyte’s harsh Scots voice echoed over the airwaves.

“Just in case anyone missed it,” the interviewer said, “this is the remark the Secretary of State for Social Affairs and Citizenship made last night, sparking controversy in some corners over the lack of backlash she has received.”

Nicola’s voice entered the fray, and Malcolm groaned. What the fuck had she done this time? “I think we do have a, uh, problem with Travellers and Gypsies in this country. You know, their children’s school attendance tends to be poor, their access to the NHS can become quite limited and without a fixed address, they will struggle to obtain any state assistance. Those who still live on the road often live in harsh and inhospitable conditions.”

He didn’t stop to hear Bella’s next response – he already had a fair idea of what it was going to be. “Fucking hell, Nicola!” he roared. It never ceased to astound him, the extent to which his fiancée was able to fuck up. He put on his coat and stormed out of Number 10.

When he got to DoSAC, Nicola was already hiding; someone must have explained to her that Bella had just pointed out what an idiot she had sounded, and she knew Malcolm was bound to show up sooner or later. It was just too bad for her that he knew Nicola Murray better than anyone on the planet, with the exception of her own mother, and had no qualms about barging his way into her office. “Could you have found a way to come across as a bigger fucking cunt?!” he bellowed at her.

“Okay, I can see you’re-”

“Too fucking right I am!” All the tension he had held in for the past six weeks broke through, and Nicola was in the firing line. “What were you fucking thinking?! Oh, aye!” he shouted, feigning realisation. “You fucking weren’t! Your two wee lonely brain cells ricocheting off your skull fucking collided and spewed out, 'We have a fucking problem with an entire ethnic group of fucking British and Irish society!' You fucking idiot, Nicola!”

“I was fucking nervous!” she yelled back at him. “I got the fucking words out the wrong way round, okay?! I meant to say they face problems settled people don’t, not that we have a fucking problem with them!”

“Oh, well, that’s okay then. As long as _you_ know what you fucking meant!”

“Malcolm, calm down before you work yourself into a fucking brain haemorrhage! It’s easily fixed!”

“Get a fucking statement drafted!” he thundered. “'I am a fucking half-witted toddler who can’t be trusted to say my fucking words in the right order!' That’ll fucking do. And fucking apologise to the Scottish Secretary for any fucking miscommunication and misunderstanding caused, unless you want Bella to rip out your stomach and use it for a fucking hat!”

“What’s Bella Whyte getting on her high horse for, anyway?!” demanded Nicola hotly.

Malcolm hesitated for half a moment before shouting, “Who fucking knows? But she is, and while she’s on that high fucking horse, all five foot five of you is down here on Earth, and she’s wielding the fucking claymore of your fucking beheading if you don’t smooth this bout of fucking casual racism out!”

“I am _not_ a fucking racist!”

“Then get out there and explain that you’re not a racist, you’re just a bit below average in the department of fucking common sense!” he yelled. He could not lower the volume of his voice. It just got louder. It made his ears hum like he had tinnitus; he fleetingly wondered if Nicola was scared yet. The room was suddenly far too bright. His skin started to prickle horribly, like there was slightly too-hot water in every pore he possessed.

“Malcolm?” Nicola called out. She was no longer angry. When he found her face, she was worried.

He brushed off her concern and stalked out of the office, heading now to the Scottish office.

By the time he got there, Bella had finished her interview and was back in her office. When her door crashed open, her head snapped up; her hair, in the damp, wintry weather, was even less tame than usual, bouncing for a moment with the movement of Bella’s head before it resettles itself. “You,” he snarled. “Don’t you ever make a fellow Cabinet minister sound like a racist twat again. The last fucking thing we need is an accusation of power struggles and in-fighting between fucking ministers!”

Bella was taken aback. “If you recall, Malcolm,” she growled, getting to her feet, “not once did I say Nicola Murray is a racist. In fact, I fucking said she was misguided, not malicious, and she’s probably in the fucking majority in being so!”

“I fucking know, alright?!” he bellowed. “I know you’re a-”

“Keep your fucking voice down,” she hissed.

The only reason he managed to do that was that he remembered why he had lied to Nicola on the night of his birthday – it didn’t do anyone any good to out a Traveller. “I know you’re a fucking Traveller,” he said. “And if you want to keep it quiet, that’s your own fucking choice, but if that’s what you want then I’d advise against opening your trap on the radio like that!”

Bella fell silent for a moment. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“It’s none of my fucking business,” he replied.

“How did you even fucking know?”

“High colour.”

“What?” she frowned.

“The only time I’ve ever heard that phrase used is by Travellers,” he admitted. “It’s called cant, isn’t it?”

Bella nodded, her face having drained white at the news someone had her figured out. “You can’t fucking tell anyone. You’ve no idea, Malcolm.”

He did have some idea, but he chose not to tell her that. The last thing he fucking needed was a conversation with Bella Whyte about his time around Travellers. “For the record,” Malcolm said, “Nicola being fucking Nicola, she meant to say that Travellers have problems settled people don’t, not that we have a problem with Travellers. She got the words out wrong. She’s a fucking anxious mess every time someone interviews her,” he explained, flicking a finger towards his head to get the message across to Bella that Nicola was nothing more than a puddle of panic, not a racist. “I’ve told her to fucking explain herself.”

“Does she know?”

“No,” he said. “No, there was no reason to fucking tell her.”

He watched her hair again, constantly in awe of the amount of space it claimed. They stood in silence for a good two minutes, Bella watching him as he watched her. She never showed him any fear, or any indication that his attention made her at all uncomfortable. If anything, she examined him as closely as he did her.

He noticed that Bella had very faint freckles across her cheekbones, even in the middle of December. He reached out and touched them gently. “The freckles?” she asked with a smile, her teeth bared like the wolf’s yet again. “When you’ve been on berry fields nearly every summer of your life and tattie fields every autumn, they stop fading.”

He chuckled slightly.

He realised quite suddenly that he had not touched Bella since the night of his birthday. It had not been completely deliberate, more an unavoidable part of him putting a little distance between them. But after six weeks of no contact and watching her so closely, the compulsion to find out what her face felt like was overwhelming. The skin on her face was not soft, but it wasn’t rough, either. It was somewhat weather-beaten – the hot sun of working summers combined with the harsh winds of both east and west Scottish coasts could have done her complexion no favours as a child and young woman. But it didn’t detract from her beauty. She was definitely beautiful, albeit in a hardened sort of way.

He lifted a section of her hair, finding it was much longer than he had originally thought. It was naturally a bright blonde. “Your hair is…” he said, running his fingers through it, trying to find the right adjective. It wasn’t at all soft, but it wasn’t dry. Its curls were not ordered or neat, but chaotic and senseless.

“My mum’s. Unfortunately, I inherited my mum’s fuck-off mental hair. Gave up on controlling it by the time I was about twelve.”

He nodded, not elaborating any further for fear of digging himself into a hole.

The door opened behind them, and before Malcolm or Bella had the opportunity to put a professional amount of space between them, Nicola said, “Malcolm?”

He turned around to find Nicola looking confused and – he swore internally when he saw it – hurt. “Nicola,” Bella smiled. “Malcolm was just explaining about your mishap last night. Words the wrong way round. That’s a new one!”

Nicola slammed the door shut. “Would someone like to tell me what the fucking hell you two are playing at?!” She advanced on them, but neither retreated from her. Bella, after all, had nothing to hide and therefore nothing to fear. Malcolm did not have that luxury, but he knew Nicola well enough to know when to run from her and when to face her. “She’s fucking eighteen years younger than you!” Nicola shouted at Malcolm.

“No, Nic’la-” he began, but Bella cut in with a fit of laughter.

“What you think…me and him?” Bella laughed, like she barely believed Nicola could have ever had that thought, never mind shared it. “Fucking hell, Nicola, not in a million years! I’m perfectly happy with Euan, thank you very much!”

Nicola turned her glare to Malcolm. “I just came up here to explain to Bella that I misspoke last night, and that I didn’t mean what she thought I did, but it seems I’ve got a bigger fucking problem.”


	4. Love or Division?

Nicola’s expression was one of outrage, confusion and betrayal. Malcolm could feel his blood pressure rising with every option taken from him. He could not tell Nicola the truth for two reasons: Bella was standing right here with them, and he didn’t believe he could actually come out with it and make it real. But he could not lie, because Nicola already accused him of cheating, and a lie could only heighten her suspicions.

He could have walked out of the room, if not for the fact Nicola was blocking the door, and he knew he would not lay his hands on her to forcibly move her.

So he walked up to her, put his hands on her face and gave her the one scrap of truth he could. “Nic’la, I will swear on the life of whoever you want me to that I am _not_ having any fucking affair, with Bella or anyone else.”

The suspicion did not leave her face, but upon searching his eyes as she did when she tried to gain his trust, she relented and said, “Alright. Alright, you’re not sleeping with her. But Malcolm, I _know_ you’re lying about something.”

The prickling sensation resumed its attack on his skin, and the whirring of computers and ringing of phones made his ears hum. He felt trapped, out of options. There was a pounding in his head that intensified with Nicola’s touch on his arm, steadying him as the lights made his eyes ache and he lost his confidence in his balance. She could see it. He knew she could. She always saw when he started to become dangerously stressed.

“Nic’la,” he said quietly. “I need you to let me out of this room.”

She frowned at him, but did not object. She cleared the door and he stalked out. He half-ran out the building, only to find it had started to snow. The flakes spun to the Earth, landing on his face as he looked up to the grey sky. There was something about snow that made the air smell clean, even here in murky old London. Wherever it snowed around Malcolm – Glasgow, London, Helmsdale, Edinburgh, Toronto, Aberdeen, Inverness, Washington, Pitlochry – the air felt cleansed, whether it was rural Helmsdale or smoggy London. And though snow, particularly in places like London which came to a standstill after the first lying inch, could become a source of inconvenience, these first few flakes were one of the few things Malcolm believed to be truly beautiful.

He didn’t rush back to Number 10. He walked slowly, deliberately, relishing the distance he put between himself and those two women. He loved Nicola. He did. But sometimes he wondered how she could ever love him, after putting up with so much from James; Malcolm, after all, was no angel. He was foul-mouthed and ill-tempered. He was infamous for it. Perhaps he would never understand how Nicola managed to love a creature like him.

And then there was Bella. Bella had been his friend. A genuine friend, who stood up to him when he was wrong, never letting him leave a situation without knowing he was wrong if he was. He could not have that with her anymore. Today proved that. He had allowed her close to him today, and he could not resist the proximity, the familiarity, he knew he could not allow for himself. All it had done was given Nicola the wrong impression and left Bella completely befuddled. There were children involved here, too. His own stepchildren had been through enough, and didn’t need discord between him and Nicola. Bella’s children were only three and seven, and had been uprooted from island life and thrown into the madness of living in a city. They didn’t need all this, either.

When he got to his office, he was exhausted. It was only midday, but he felt like he couldn’t take another minute of life. Desperate for a distraction, he fired up his computer and sat down. He logged in and waited for the fucking thing to load, watching that spinning circle like its continued movement was the only thing tethering him to reality. Maybe it was.

Could he live like this? Could he manage to be Bella’s spin doctor and nothing more? Could he keep lying to Nicola? Nicola was hugely empathetic and had very little skill when it came to critical thinking; he was subscribing to a life of her knowing everything was not alright, but never knowing why. If it didn’t drive him mad, it was sure to strip her of what little sanity she did cling to.

And that was the reason he had to leave her. If he could not live with himself, how could he expect her to live with him?

But he had got rid of his own place after moving in with Nicola in the kids’ summer holidays. It was just simpler all around, and he was already spending the bulk of his time there. Now, it seemed a rather fucking stupid move.

He got up and went to see Jamie, pulling him out of the loud communal office. “I need somewhere to crash for a few nights until I sort something fucking permanent out,” he said. There was no point in being coy about asking for somewhere to sleep.

“You’re leaving Nicola?” Jamie asked, completely disregarding the request to sleep on his couch. “Malcolm, don’t be so fucking stupid. Whatever’s been wrong with you the past month, Nicola is the one person who fucking gets through that dense skull of yours!”

“That’s the fucking problem!” Malcolm hissed, his self-restraint fraying, each individual thread breaking one by one.

Jamie shot him a curious look; Malcolm knew he had just put his foot in it and was now knee-high in shit. “What’s going on, Malcolm?”

“I…” Malcolm began, but he faltered in the knowledge that those words must never leave his mouth.

“Are you ill?” Jamie asked bluntly. “Because I’ve got to admit, you’ve been a right twat the past few weeks, but not in the normal way.”

“Fucking thanks,” grumbled Malcolm.

“You fucking know you have,” Jamie retorted. “Bella Whyte can’t fucking work out when it was she kicked you in the balls. Tom’s more fucking confused than ever, and that fucking says something. Even Nicola’s fucking worried you’re gonna have one too many on Christmas Day and do something fucking stupid!”

That Nicola was worried about his behaviour becoming worse over Christmas was news to him; she hadn’t expressed any concern about that.

“It’s Bella at the fucking root of this,” Jamie surmised. “You’ve been just plain shitty towards the rest of us, but your mood swings with her are un-fucking-real.”

“Nicola thought I was cheating with her,” mumbled Malcolm.

“With fucking Bella?” Jamie laughed. “There’s not a man in fucking London who’d dare make a pass at Bella Whyte!”

“Exactly. I think Nicola fucking knows that now.”

The door of their deserted little back office crashed open. “Enough is enough, Malcolm!” Nicola told him, stalking towards him until his back was against the wall and she was practically standing on his feet. “Bella Whyte is sitting over there wondering what the fuck to make of what just happened. She said you can’t decide whether to be nice or fucking bollock her for some made-up, bullshit reason! You can’t continue like this!”

Malcolm glanced over at Jamie for help, but he just said, “She’s right, Malcolm.”

He sat down on the floor and put his head in his hands. He didn’t want to see Nicola looking up at him with her anger and her love. He couldn’t bear it. “Look,” he said through his fingers, “even if I told you, you wouldn’t fucking believe me.”

“Fucking try us,” Jamie snapped; it was clear his patience for his friend’s behaviour was waning, and fast.

Malcolm looked up at Jamie. “How many people d’you think were on Skye in the 1970s? Not counting tourists.”

“Dunno,” Jamie said, climbing down from the desk on which he sat. “Six, seven thousand? It’s a big island but even now there’s only about nine, ten thousand fucking living there.”

“And would it be at all possible that two boys from Glasgow both went up to Portree to work in a hotel for the summer, under the same circumstances?”

“I’d doubt it,” Jamie said.

That was it. That was the problem – there was no way the evidence he had was pointing him in the wrong direction. He was the only boy from Glasgow who ended up just outside Portree, who fell in the Stewart family of Travellers, who spent the summer with Bernadette Stewart and her siblings. Bernadette was the crucial link. She was the one he’d ended up having a silly romance with, right under her parents’ nose.

Nicola knelt down in front of him. “Look at yourself, Malcolm. Whatever this is, it’s eating you up. You need to tell us.”

“Bella Whyte.”

“What about her?” Nicola asked.

“I think she must be…” Malcolm said. Nicola’s eyes met his, and he swallowed back his fear. It went against everything he thought he had to do, but he decided Nicola had to know, and Jamie was capable of keeping his mouth shut about it. “I think Bella must be my daughter.”

He waited for the explosion, or the laughter, but neither came. Nicola, having raised four kids, knew how to deal with statements that sounded a bit fucking crazy. “What makes you think that?” she asked him gently.

“Bella was telling me last month that she knew everything about her real father, except his name,” Malcolm explained. “Apparently, her mother didn’t want to make his life more complicated than it fucking needed to be. But anyway, she told me her father had gone up to Skye after his dad killed himself, and got friendly with Bella’s mother. And everything she told me about her father fits me, Nic’la,” he told her, wishing it wasn’t true. “Every story they told her is about me. I knew her mother. I knew the whole family. Bernadette and Alec Stewart were the twins. Hendry was a couple years older, and Kathleen was older than him. She visited from Dunkeld sometimes. Bernadette is Bella’s mother, and that summer, I was-”

He stopped talking because he didn’t sound fucking sane.

“Bella’s birthday is the second of June,” Nicola said calmly. How was she not losing her fucking mind over this? “She’s thirty-two, so she was born in 1978. Were you with Bernadette at the start of September 1977?”

“I didn’t leave Skye until near the end of September,” Malcolm said. “I stayed longer than I should’ve before university, because I wanted to make as much as I could so I didn’t have to ask my mother for help.”

Nicola looked over her shoulder at Jamie, who looked like someone had just thrown a fucking brick at his face. “It sounds like it has to be you,” Jamie conceded. “I mean, it’s hardly likely to be anyone else. There could’ve only been one Bernadette fucking Stewart in Portree in 1977.”

To his surprise, some of the tension left Malcolm. The fact his fiancée and his friend had heard it and not told him he was mental, and that they hadn’t freaked out, was reassuring. But the wealth of emotion the admission brought upon him was indecipherable. What was he meant to feel for Bella? This was no more her fault than anyone else’s, and much less than it was his. She was his child. He was about ninety-nine percent certain of it. After a year of her friendship, of finding out who she was and how she operated, he didn’t know how to feel about the idea that this was his own daughter he saw every day.

His daughter, born into a family of hard-up Highland Travellers, had gone on to be Scottish Secretary. His daughter, despite his absence and her rough start in life, had defied all the odds. She was wild. She was boisterous. She was everything he once aspired to be, before his world contracted around him at sixteen.

“Do you think she should know?” Nicola asked him.

“I don’t fucking know,” he snapped. “She keeps trying to get Charlie to tell her the truth.”

“Charlie?”

“Her grandfather.” He paused for a moment. “Don’t either of you breathe a word of this, or I’ll have to drain your blood and sell it off to make black pudding.”

They both gave him a look that scolded him for doubting their silence.

Jamie crouched down beside them. “Tell ye what,” he said, “I’ll tell Tom you’ve both come down with some fucking norovirus type thing. I’ll get Terri to write up a statement about your fuck up last night, Nicola, and we’ll email it out. Go home and get some rest, Malcolm. You fucking need it, the way you’ve been thrashing about this place.”

Malcolm glanced at Nicola, who nodded slightly. “Let’s go home, love,” she said. “You’re in no state to be here today.”

He slowly got back to his feet. He didn’t want to admit defeat. To go home because he was too emotional was, to him, letting the world win. But he wanted time with Nicola. He wanted time alone with her before the children got home, to get this vulnerability out of his system so he could make his decisions between truth and lies, love and division. As much as he would have loved to carry on being completely independent, isolated by his own behaviour, he needed Nicola. She had the ability to put herself in his shoes, and Bella’s. It was the first time he had fully appreciated how much he needed Nicola.

He had never needed anyone before. There had never been a situation of such magnitude that he couldn’t find his way out of it on his own, even if there were a few casualties along the way.

In the car, stuck in London traffic, Malcolm finally found something to say to Nicola. “Why aren’t you fucking angry?”

She turned her head to look at him for a split second before putting the car in gear. “Everyone comes with history. I don’t see you hating me for having four kids, an abusive ex-husband and several mental health issues.”

“This is different.”

“No, Malcolm,” Nicola said firmly, “it isn’t. You have a past. It just so happens you didn’t know what the outcome of that was, and now it’s caught up with you. This is _not_ your fault.”

“Nic’la, do you fucking understand what’s happened?” he asked her, seriously concerned that she was in denial, or that her constantly misfiring brain hadn’t taken in what he’d just explained to her.

“Yes. What I don’t understand is why you want me to fucking hate you for it!”

He shook his head and stared out the car windshield in front. The snow hadn’t stopped falling, dancing towards them as they drove through it. Nicola, at the moment, was all he had. His impulse was to push her away, to detach himself, purely because he didn’t think he was worthy of her time, patience and affection after how he’d behaved in the past six weeks. He had pushed her to her limits with his temper, with many hushed arguments in the kitchen about his demeanour and nights he didn’t even go to bed – those were the nights he fell asleep on the sofa with no idea of his place in the world.

They soon reached the house, and there was still a good two hours before the kids had to be picked up. Malcolm got out the car without a word, but Nicola caught his arm before he could even put the key in the door. “Let me in, Malcolm,” she implored him.

“Well, I would if you’d let me unlock the fucking front door,” he quipped.

She fought down a smile and raised an eyebrow. “You fucking know that’s not what I meant.”

The snow swirled around them, becoming heavier and heavier. It crossed his mind that it might actually lie and become a pain in the arse. It always both amused and infuriated him that everything came to a standstill down here, for the sake of a couple of inches of snow. Schools shut, roads closed and blocked by morons who didn’t know how to drive in the snow, while most of Scotland put a coat on and got on with life until there was a good foot or more on the ground.

He sighed, and did the one thing he’d not done nearly enough since all this hell broke loose inside him. He took Nicola into his arms and held her close, allowing himself to remember what it was to feel safe and understood. Physically, she was not in any way protective. His arms swallowed her up with ease. But in every other sense, Nicola was his armour.


	5. Winter

Malcolm sat with the cup of tea Nicola had made him, staring out the window. The drive was white, and the street – in evidence of how unprepared London was for snow – was quickly following suit. “We might as well stay in fucking bed tomorrow,” he grumbled. “Fucking roads’ll be blocked like a fucking obstructed bowel.”

“You could get to central London on the train and get the Tube,” Nicola pointed out.

“Maybe, but you fucking can’t,” he reminded her. “You, in a sealed tin fucking can travelling at high-speed through a dark tunnel? Think the Tube’s busy on a normal morning? Try it when every fucker is so scared to get in the car or on a bus that they’d rather get to work like vacuum packed fucking salmon.”

“Bella will get in, mark my words,” Nicola said, trying extremely hard to sound casual about it and failing fucking miserably. “She’s not one to bow down to the weather.”

“Maybe not in Scotland,” scoffed Malcolm. “That’s the problem with being a Scot in London. You discover pretty fucking quickly you’re the only person in a fucking five-mile radius who can control a fucking car in the snow,” he explained. “Even if we did try to drive, you can guarantee some fucking reprobate will have crashed into a fucking lamp post within a mile of here, and then the fucking police will block the road and then the council won’t be able to fucking salt it.”

“You don’t have much faith in Londoners and their driving abilities, do you?”

“I’ve been given no fucking reason to have faith in them.”

Nicola’s phone rang. “Hello, Nicola Murray,” she answered. “Ah, hello!” She listened to whatever was being said, looking less than impressed. “I see. No, no, it’s alright. I can come and pick them up. Okay, thanks.” She hung up the phone and said to Malcolm, “Ben and Sophie’s school bus isn’t running. The driver doesn’t feel confident driving children in ‘adverse conditions,’ apparently.”

“Adverse conditions,” snorted Malcolm. “It’s a fucking nice day, considering it’s the fucking twenty-first of December!” He rolled his eyes and stood up; he grabbed the keys from the sideboard. It put a stop to his wish of having alone time with Nicola, but he also wanted to spend some time with the children after being so distant and grouchy recently. “Let’s go and pick them up, then.”

“There’s still another hour and a half before they get out of school,” Nicola protested.

“Like they’re fucking doing anything useful on the second to last day before they get off for Christmas. Teacher’s probably got pissed off with trying to get any sense out of them and they’re sitting watching the fucking Grinch, or fucking Harry Potter.” He pulled on a coat and added, “Besides, I’d rather they got out in the snow than sat watching movies and colouring in pictures of fucking Christmas trees.”

When he turned to hand Nicola her coat, he found her grinning up at him.

“What?”

“You don’t see yourself the way we do,” Nicola said. “You’re a complete dickhead, but you’re _our_ complete dickhead.”

Malcolm didn’t say anything in reply. He didn’t think there was much he could say. This was Nicola, and her attempt to make him feel adequate, to help him believe he could take on the idea of having a child, regardless of the fact she was thirty-two years old with a family of her own. He should have expected it, but still it surprised him. Not that she said it, but that she meant it.

Malcolm drove. Nicola got wound up enough in perfect conditions, and he could imagine her being the worst of the worst about snow, having grown up in the south of England. Malcolm, on the other hand, had passed his driving test in the dead of winter, surrounded by about eight inches of snow. He got them to the primary school, taking only a couple of minutes longer than the journey normally would take.

They went into the front reception and Malcolm said with a slight chuckle, “Hey. We’re here to pick up Ben and Sophie Murray before the weather causes everyone to forget how to drive.”

“You realise you’re over an hour early?” the young woman challenged him.

Nicola raised an eyebrow. “Yes, we do,” she answered. “But as your bus driver has decided he’s not competent enough to drive my children to their stop, it’s mine and their stepfather’s prerogative to collect them when we see fit.”

It was one of those few occasions – and they only ever occurred when she was talking to someone who could be intimidated – that Nicola’s stern expression meant she got her own way; personally, Malcolm would have laughed in her face, but obviously this receptionist reckoned it wasn’t wise to argue with Nicola Murray. She called Ben and Sophie’s individual classrooms and told each teacher that their pupil’s mum and stepdad were there to take them home.

Both children were delighted to see them; Sophie ran to Malcolm’s arms. She was the only one of Nicola’s children who did not react to his mood swings of late. She treated him the same, whether he was in high spirits or a bad temper. He believed that she could, despite her young age, see behind his mood and see he was just Malcolm, and nothing more or less; it was something he’d never known a child to be capable of.

Back in the car, Malcolm said, “Will we go and get Ella? Her school’s just a wee bit down the road.”

“There’s been nothing about her bus, so I assume it’s running,” Nicola replied.

“Yeah, but imagine the face on her when she finds out we picked Ben and Sophie up early and not her,” Malcolm reasoned. “It’s not really fair to leave her there ‘til four when she could be at home.”

Nicola gasped with a smile of mock outrage. “And you say _I’m_ the soft touch!”

Malcolm shrugged and took the turn off to Ella’s school. Ella was ecstatic to be taken out of her French class where, Ella complained profusely, she had learned absolutely nothing in the past week but the French for ‘snowman’ and ‘Christmas tree.’

As they reached Nicola’s street, her phoned beeped. She was soon chucking sympathetically, “Oh, poor Bella!” Malcolm chose not to respond, not knowing how to react to Bella being in a situation worthy of sympathy. “All flights to Dublin are cancelled so her au pair is staying for Christmas, and her mum’s due at Euston station in about ten minutes, and Eilidh’s school has closed early, and Alasdair’s playgroup shut at two o’clock when the snow started to lie.”

Bella’s mum. Bernadette. How many times had he shared this city with her and never known it?

Nicola seemed to realise only then what she had said, who she had mentioned; the look she shot at Malcolm was one of apprehension. All Malcolm could find to say was, “Well, at least Aoife’s there to pick up Eilidh. And Aoife’s not from Dublin. She’s from Louth,” he recalled. “Are there no flights to Belfast and she can get a train to Drogheda?”

“I doubt it,” Nicola said, “and even if there were, it’ll be hell getting down to Louth. Aoife always says Ireland goes all to shit when it snows.”

“In fairness, it’s usually rain they get, not snow.”

Children, Malcolm had discovered in his time being Nicola’s partner, were the perfect distraction from life’s woes and anxieties. It was so easy to forget the world as he sneaked up on Ben and decked him into the snow, making him giggle and throw loose snow into Malcolm’s face. To hide behind the shed with Ella as Ben, Sophie and Nicola stalked them with snowballs, only for Ella to use him as a human shield when Nicola broke their defences, was something so simple and yet so ridiculously filled with joy. When he slung Ella over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift and gently dropped her kicking and cackling into the deepening snow as punishment for getting him pelted by Nicola brought him a sense of paternity he had rarely known.

They made the decision, between only them, not to even bother trying to send them to school the next day. If they even got there, they were sure to be sent back by lunchtime. However, they didn’t tell the kids this, and let them think they would be going to school if it opened in the morning. If Jamie had told the Prime Minister that both Malcolm and Nicola had a virus, they could quite easily get out of the last day in the office, too. Malcolm didn’t even have it in him to feel guilty for it – that place took everything he had on a daily basis. This week, over Christmas, he decided he would take something back.

And for the first time in six weeks, Malcolm felt okay. He wasn’t brilliant, but he wasn’t bad. He wasn’t the short-fused, temperamental twat he had been recently. The thought of Bella, and now of Bernadette, gnawed away at him still, but it did so slowly and without urgency. Right now, he had a family of his own making, even if none of them were related to him.

In keeping with the assertion that they would be going to school in the morning, Nicola and Malcolm followed the usual routine of putting Ben to be at eight, Sophie at nine and Ella at ten.

Lying in bed with Nicola, Malcolm’s thoughts drifted to Bella once more; Nicola seemed to see this and lay with her arm across his chest, her head resting on his shoulder. “It’ll be okay, you know,” Nicola assured him quietly. “When you tell her.”

“I’m telling her fucking nothing,” he retorted.

“Malcolm,” she sighed. “Stop being-”

“What?” he snapped. “Cruel? Fucking harsh? You fucking know me, Nicola.”

She fell silent, but did not detach herself from him, so he pushed her off and got out of bed. He didn’t know where he was going, but he had to go somewhere. “Malcolm, no!” Nicola protested. “You’ve got to stop running all the time!” She was out of bed, on her feet, her thick pyjama top sliding off her shoulder and her hair a frizzy mess. He ignored her and heading for the door, but she grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him back. “No, don’t you fucking dare do what I did! Don’t you fucking run out of this house when the weather could make you fucking ill!”

Malcolm laughed incredulously. “Let me get this fucking straight. You’re completely fucking okay with Bella being my fucking child, but what fucking sends you into fucking hysterics is that I might go out and get a bit fucking chilly?!”

“ _Yes_!” she insisted, pulling him closer to her with an air of desperation. “You fucking moron! Why can’t you accept that I’ll never fucking hold that against you?! But what I can’t do anything about is you fucking off into the snow and getting fucking hypothermia!”

“Oh, don’t fucking be so English! It’s barely even fucking cold!”

Why were they arguing about the temperature? What did that matter when everything else was crumbling around them, and they became a little island in all the shit? Their petty arguments all boiled down to the fact that Malcolm couldn’t live with this idea that Bella Whyte was his flesh and blood.

“You have fucking grandchildren, Malcolm!” Nicola told him. “Do you realise that? Those two little children are your fucking grandchildren! And you’re telling me you don’t give a shit? Even your heart isn’t _that_ hard!”

Nicola’s eyes slashed through him with their blades of determined love; he pondered for a moment on what it would take for her to disown him. Abuse, obviously, since she had divorced James for that. Cowardice? No, or she would have finished with Malcolm weeks ago. History? Not if what she said was anything to go by.

He wanted to leave. Not because he didn’t love Nicola – he loved her so much that feeling like this burned like he had swallowed hot wax – but because he couldn’t bear to be treated with compassion when he was so clearly pathetic. She gave him love and respect he had never really deserved, and now, he had earned her contempt and derision – and the only thing she fretted over was that he might venture out into the winter outside.

“Nic’la,” he groaned. His knees bent, he put his face straight in front of hers as he held her by the arms. “I am not father material. Even if I wanted to tell Bella the truth, do you really think the truth would do her any fucking good?”

“Not father material?” Nicola repeated, her laugh completely full of disbelief and absent of amusement. “See those three kids out there? They fucking adore you! They’ve got something in you they never fucking had in James – a father that gives them his time and attention! Who does things with them! Who tries to do Sophie’s hair whatever way she wants it, even if I have to come in behind you and fix it! Who’ll sit and play video games with Ben, or take him out for a kick about, or sit and draw fucking pictures with him for hours on end! Who’ll help Ella with her homework, even when whatever it is is completely beyond me, and take her out for lunch on a Saturday, just so she can have some time with a person she can have a grown-up conversation with!” she said, her tone a little frantic. “You think I haven’t noticed, Malcolm, that you’ve taken on my kids without a backwards glance?!”

Stunned, he stared into her face and watched her eyes change colour as her frustration intensified. There was so much tension in her body that the muscles in her arms had hardened under his fingers, her gaze steely, determined, and full of everything she couldn’t put into words. “I fucking love you, Malcolm. Why can’t you fucking understand that?!”

She kissed him, her lips forceful and harsh against his. Her body was stiff, stronger than he’d ever known it to be; she forced a stumble out of him as her arms wrapped around his neck and he pulled her upwards so that her legs wrapped around his waist.

Here he was, a human being, loved completely by a woman who’d trusted him with the shards of a heart shattered by tragedy, trauma and violence. And he could barely stand it.


	6. Covent Garden

At seven the next morning, out of nothing more than habit, Malcolm sat at the kitchen table with coffee and toast. Upon looking out the window, he’d found a good four inches of snow glowing orange under the streetlights. That meant there was no question of the children going to school and, even if they weren’t feigning norovirus, Nicola would never have got to the office without having a minor mental breakdown. If he could be arsed, Malcolm could have got to Number 10 via public transport, but it would have to be something far more rewarding than the fucking defective moron of a Prime Minister and clearing up the remnants of Cabinet ministers’ drunken fucking Christmas party antics to get him on that Tube.

He momentarily thought of Bella and her home, which had to be bursting at the seams; Bella, Euan, Eilidh, Alasdair, Aoife, Bernadette and, presumably, Bernadette’s husband. Christ, Bella was probably losing her fucking mind over there. She wasn’t the most patient woman, after all. She barely held it together when her advisors fucked up – the whole lot of them were fucking terrified of her.

There was a simple way Malcolm had managed to find, so he could work out Bella’s anger levels. If she muttered phrases like, ‘pòg mo thòin’ and ‘droch bhàs ort’ as she walked away, she was miffed. If she was speaking English but her accent grew more pronounced than usual, she was pissed off. When she roared in full-out Scots and then grumbled under her breath a phrase such as, ‘pannified scaldie’ or ‘coichy auld gurrach’, she was fucking fuming. And if ever, God forbid, she shouted Travellers’ cant for all to hear, Malcolm would have suggested pulling the fire alarm and evacuating the office.

“Malcolm?” a small voice asked. He looked up to find Ella hovering by the door. “Are we going to school?”

“Well,” he smiled, “if you were in Glasgow, you’d be going to school. But since this is London, and a wee bit snow is equivalent to the apocalypse here, no, darling, you’ve got the day off.”

She sat down opposite him; he pushed his stack of toast into the middle of the table for her to help herself from. “What’s wrong?” he asked. She was hesitating about something – it was obvious in the way she held her toast in the air.

“I have a hundred and ten pounds,” she murmured as she bit into her toast, hauling a load of five pound notes and one and two pound coins from her dressing down pocket and onto the table.

“Where the hell did you get a hundred and ten pounds, Ella?”

“I’ve been saving all my pocket money since July,” she explained. “I wanted to do proper Christmas shopping, to get something for Ben and Sophie’s Christmas. But I’m not allowed into the city on my own and Mum hates going in.” She looked up at Malcolm. “Can you take me? Please?”

Malcolm smiled slightly. This was the thing about Ella. Despite her defence of a hard face and a sharp tongue, Ella was the sweetest girl. However, she needed encouragement not to let her defences overwhelm her impulse for kindness. “’Course we can go into the city,” he replied. He led her to the living room, turned on the light and swiped two chocolate decorations from the Christmas tree. “Don’t fucking tell your mother or she’ll have us on a sugar rationing system until the end of January,” he told her as he handed her one. Ella grinned.

“Can we go to Covent Garden?” Ella asked.

“Wherever you want,” he said. “Strictly public transport only, though, because I think I’d have a bloody stroke driving around here in this,” he nodded out the window. “And we’ll leave here at nine so we miss the worst of the commuters.”

He turned the television on with the volume low so as not to wake up anyone else in the house, and let Ella watch what she wanted while Malcolm checked how the Underground and rail systems were coping; thus far, they seemed to be managing with only minor delays.

At five minutes to nine, Malcolm knelt at Nicola’s side of the bed, fully dressed with his coat on, and gently shook her shoulder. “Hmm?” she mumbled.

“Nic’la,” he whispered. “Ella and I are going out, okay? She wants to go to the shops. Ben and Sophie are still in bed, and the primary school’s shut.” He pulled one of the soft throws over Nicola’s bare shoulders and kissed her temple. “So you might as well just stay in bed for now.”

He smiled slightly as he stood up and looked down at the woman who was to be his wife. The amount of shit she put up with from him was grossly unfair. She did not complain nearly as often as she probably was entitled to. And last night was the first time she had ever had to stop him walking out on her; Nicola’s instinct was to try and keep him close when he made attempts to section himself. Malcolm wasn’t all that sure whether that was a blessing or a curse.

It wasn’t until they were off the DLR and on the Tube that Malcolm realised commuters weren’t at all their biggest problem. It was last minute Christmas shoppers – mostly parents with unruly young children who were missing their last day of school. He always wondered why so many parents were incapable of instilling halfway decent behaviour into their children; he had never had to give more than a firm warning to his niece or any of Nicola’s children, on the rare occasion they got overexcited and leapt over the line between being normal, animated kids and just being plain fucking naughty.

When the train stopped and they got off, Malcolm tried to keep Ella close, but she was swept away in the sea of people who just weren’t paying enough attention to notice a child being separated from her stepparent. “Ella!” he called out.

“Malcolm?!” she replied, though he barely heard her over crying toddlers and chatty students. What he did gather, though, was that she was panicking, and he couldn’t get to her. “Malcolm?!” she shouted out again, but she was now caught in the masses who passed her to board the train. “Dad!”

“Just don’t move, Ella!” he told her. “Stay where you are and _wait_!”

In under a minute, everyone had cleared the way, and Ella stood there with a look of panic and embarrassment on her face. Malcolm went to her as soon as he could see her. “I’m so sorry,” she said, completely mortified.

“Ah, you got lost in the tidal wave coming off the Tube. Happens to the best of us,” he assured her, patting her shoulder. “Should’ve seen me the first time I got off at London Bridge. Jesus, I thought they were gonna knock me over and use me for a trampoline!”

Of course, that was not why Ella was sorry, and he knew that.

“I called you-”

“You call me whatever feels right to you,” he said to her gently. “Within fucking reason, though. None of the names you’ve heard me and your mum call Ben Swain or John Duggan, right?”

Ella smiled and took a step closer to him, leaning her head on his chest. Malcolm, for only a moment, stroked her hair before leading her to the stairs for the inevitable reminder that he was no longer anywhere near as young or as fit as his mind often told him he was. Ella, as always, found this deeply amusing. He internally sighed when he recalled Bella gleefully calling him an ‘old man’; that seemed like a lifetime ago, despite less than two months having passed.

“So, what did you have in mind for Christmas presents?” Malcolm asked her.

“Sophie’s still obsessed with fairies and mythical stuff,” Ella said, “and there’s loads of things I could get her. Ben was talking about wanting the new _Shrek_ film on DVD, but his other ones are all scratched, so I could get him a box set. And Mum loves the Christmas gingerbread stuff out of the Body Shop. And you-”

“Oi,” he interrupted. “Don’t you be wasting money on me!”

She glowered at him, but did not say whether or not she would do as she was told; he ventured a guess that she wouldn’t do as he told her.

The DVDs were easily found, and Malcolm thought it was a good shout – he and Nicola had forgotten all about Ben’s love for _Shrek_ while doing the kids’ Christmas. They eventually found a little shop that sold fairy doors, so Sophie could put them on the skirting board so fairies could live in her bedroom walls. And for Nicola, Ella picked up a gingerbread man-shaped tin filled with soap, shower gel and body lotion that smelled strongly enough of ginger to clear even the worst sinuses.

“Hey, Malcolm!” roared a familiar voice. He turned around to see Bella Whyte bounding across the shop at him. “Thought you were on your deathbed!”

“Thought you were snowed in,” he retorted.

“Ah, don’t ya know, Malcolm? Euan gave us all food poisoning last night!” Bella grinned, her threatening teeth bared.

“Ah, sure, we’re all in bed with sick basins,” Bella’s au pair, Aoife, chimed in, her Louth accent more pronounced than ever. Aoife was a very tall young woman of twenty; she had Bella dwarfed by a good nine inches. She was nearly as tall as Malcolm, and that was while wearing scruffy old Converse trainers. “What’re you out for? Did Malcolm forget Nicola’s present?” she winked at Ella.

Ella chuckled. “No, I’m getting presents for Mum, Ben, Sophie and Malcolm, except Malcolm won’t leave me alone long enough to find him something!” she complained.

Aoife raised a black eyebrow at him before returning her glaze to Ella. “Tell you what, I’ll take you over to this deadly little shop I know down the road. It’s got stuff even grumpy old Malcolm might like,” she suggested. “And we can meet Bella and Malcolm back here in an hour.” She glanced at Malcolm who, sensing defeat, lifted his hands and nodded his consent.

This, of course, left him with Bella in what would have been, had she been a sane person, an awkward silence. But she wasn’t awkward at all. She appeared to have forgotten his hot and cold episode yesterday. “Listen, Bella,” Malcolm said as they wandered out of the shop, “about yesterday, I’m really fucking sorry. It’s just the stress of Tom being the biggest disaster on two fucking legs, and Nic’la needing a fucking ten-mile exclusion zone every time she’s interviewed,” he invented wildly.

“It’s fine, Malcolm,” she assured him. She looked up at him and added, “You did fucking forget to get Nicola a Christmas present, didn’t you?”

“Aye,” he grumbled.

“Knew it,” she scoffed. “I’m actually glad Aoife went away with Ella. I’ve been trying to get her a Christmas present all fucking morning, but you’d think I had a second shadow. She dropped her iPod on the Tube last week and shattered the screen, so I was going to get her a new one,” she explained, leading him towards the Apple Store. “And a protective case,” she added with a smile.

“That’s nice of you,” he said, wondering if he would have been so thoughtful about someone who worked for him.

“You’re kidding, right?” Bella answered. “I’d be fucking lost without that girl. She’s not just the childminder – she’s part of the family. No, she’s to be treated like one of my own bairns, I’m determined to do that.”

They decided upon an iPod Touch fairly quickly; the time came for Malcolm to find something for Nicola, and he found that every time he thought he’d found the right thing, he second guessed it. The one thing she would have wanted for Christmas was the one thing he could not give her – to tell Bella the truth and put an end to this madness that intermittently overwhelmed him.

“Oh, what about this?!” exclaimed Bella. She pointed at a Swiss Army knife, so typical of her own tastes that Malcolm had to laugh.

“Considering she ended in hospital because James put a knife in her leg,” he reminded Bella, “I don’t think it’d be fucking appreciated.”

“Oh, fuck, aye!” Bella half-shouted. “That’d go down like a lead fucking balloon.” A harassed-looking man, probably another person who’d left their other half’s present until the last moment, barged past Bella, knocking her around by the shoulder. “Fucking shan hantle,” she muttered to herself.

Malcolm remembered what ‘shan hantle’ meant – literally translated, it meant ‘bad people’ but was used to describe people in any way displeasing – and smiled wryly. Little did Bella know her mother once called half of Portree shan hantle every time she got impatient with tourists. Or, more likely, Bella did know this, as she probably inherited the phrase from Bernadette, but she couldn’t possibly know that Malcolm had heard her, and that he knew what Bella had just said. He chose not to outwardly acknowledge her words.

Bella approached a window and yelled, “Malcolm!” For a moment, he thought she was in trouble but when his eyes fell upon her, he realised her urgency was in fact excitement. “This is it! This is the thing!” He followed where her finger pointed. It was a long gold chain with a key and tiny heart attached to it. Malcolm sighed. How was it that Bella was always fucking right about these things?

When they recongregated with Ella and Aoife, Malcolm was slightly horrified to listen to a plan being made, to which he could make no reasonable objection.

“I want to wrap these but I can’t do it at home. Someone will walk in and see it,” Ella complained.

“Come round ours and do it,” Bella suggested. “Aoife’s fucking Christmas mad – she’s got enough paper and ribbons to wrap around the Old Man of Storr at home.”

“Ah, I’ve got this deadly shiny red paper!” Aoife said.

Malcolm couldn’t do anything but agree. There was no way to dispute such a perfect solution without giving away that there was something amiss. And he couldn’t really say, “Sorry, Ella, but we can’t go around to Bella’s because her mum is there and I’m Bella’s dad and it’ll be a shit show,” could he?

So he trailed after them, heading for the Tube, praying to whatever entity might exist that Bernadette did not so much as fucking flinch when she saw him. He hoped that in thirty years, he might have aged enough that she wouldn’t recognise him. Feeling totally railroaded and at the mercy of everyone else, he stood with his hands on Ella’s shoulders as their carriage hurtled them towards the unknown.


	7. Bernadette

Bella Whyte’s home was not the military-style boot camp Malcolm had anticipated. There was a disorganised mass of shoes of varying sizes at the door. Hanging from the post at the bottom of the bannister was a small mountain of coats and scarves. The house smelled of bacon – Malcolm ventured that someone was cooking. “Bella? That you?!” called her husband, Euan Whyte.

“Aye!” Bella shouted back to the kitchen as she pulled her coat off. “Where’s the kinchins?!”

“Ben the hoose, watchin’ a film wi’ yer ma! Gordon’s up the stair wi’ a hangover, the peevy auld buck!”

“Euan!” Bella roared in outraged. “Nix mang! He’ll be pirin’!”

To Malcolm’s right, Aoife grinned and said, “Euan, Gordon and I got locked last night. My liver’s a bit weird so I don’t get hangovers, but Gordon’s got it feckin’ brutal.”

“Ach, ah’m heedin’!” laughed Euan. He came down the hallway with a bacon roll in his hand. He kissed Bella and said, one foot on the stairs, “Just gonnae feed the scaldie! Aw, hey, Malcolm, Ella,” he added when he caught sight of his guests. “Ye’ll get a rowt ben the kitchen.”

Bella hit him with her scarf as he bolted up the stairs. Malcolm, both nervous and bewildered, having only understood scraps of their conversation, helped Ella out of her coat, and then helped Aoife out of hers. Anything to keep him out of the living room and lengthen the stay of his execution.

“Ma,” Bella said as she walked into the living room. “There’s hantle in-aboot so halt yer cant. Thon cowie jans wur nackens but ye ken whit like.” She turned around to look at him, Aoife taking Ella and her bag of presents past them, and said, “C’mon, then. We dinnae bite.”

“You fucking might,” he shot back at her.

“Aye, well, Ma won’t bite,” she corrected herself with a grin.

Malcolm forced a chuckle. Meanwhile, his brain turned overtime trying to find a way out of this. Could he fake sickness? Or pretend to need the bathroom? He could, but it would only be temporary, and he would, eventually, still be forced into a room with a woman he’d not seen in over thirty years, and with whom he shared a child. The problem was that his feet refused to take him into that situation.

The thought of it, the idea of Bernadette’s reaction, caused him the same sensation of utter panic he’d found the day he’d put all these pieces together, wrecked his office and fell to his knees at Nicola’s feet. Rooted to the spot, he wanted to run, but there was nowhere he could go. He had a responsibility to Ella to stay, and yet to stay was the one thing he could not possibly do.

He was a failure. He was letting Ella down by not managing the situation, and by being frightened of what lay before him. Wasn’t he supposed to do right by Ella, always? Wasn’t he meant to put his own fear to one side and never let her see that there was something very wrong with this state of affairs? Wasn’t it his duty to walk into that room and pretend he’d never seen Bernadette before, and deny her the opportunity to do anything but do the same? Ella, after all, had coped with more than enough already. She did not need her stepfather blowing the family apart over a teenage fling and the resulting daughter.

But despite knowing all of this to be true, Malcolm could not bring himself to follow Bella into the fray. An anvil crushed his chest, too heavy to allow for the inflation of his lungs. Pins and needles started in his fingers.

“Are you okay?” he heard Bella ask. He could not answer her – he could not tell her the truth, but she was not stupid enough to believe the lie. “Malcolm?”

Ella appeared in the doorway, staring up at him. “He’s having a panic attack,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ve only ever seen him like this once, but it’s definitely a panic attack.” She stepped past Bella and took Malcolm by the hand, sitting down on the stairs and gesturing for him to do the same. “You’ll be okay, Malcolm,” she reminded him. “You’re safe.”

He stared ahead of him, preferring not to see Bella’s expression, and concentrated on the idea that, whatever the outcome, he was at least physically safe. And, unless he did something really fucking horrendous, his relationship with Nicola – the woman without whom he could never manage to live with any of this – was secure, and safe, regardless of his own failings. He put his face into his hands, propping himself up with his elbows digging into his knees.

“Breathe out,” Ella ordered him. “You know how to do this, Malcolm. Breathe out.”

“Is there anything I can do?” asked a vaguely familiar voice.

“Glass of water?” Ella suggested.

Malcolm pushed the air up and out through his mouth. With some of the pressure on his chest relieved, his internal monologue wasn’t quite so manic. His head in his hands, and with Ella rubbing his back, he forced his breathing back into something that resembled a normal fucking rhythm. “That’s it,” Ella encouraged him.

A hand passed him a glass of water. “Thanks,” he muttered; he swallowed a mouthful of the water, the coldness of it tethering him to where and when he existed.

Slowly, the world slotted back into place. It was still topsy turvy and it was still a disaster waiting to happen, but it was back where it was before anxiety and panic had run rampant through his mind and body. He lifted his head and saw Bella gazing down at him, her expression one of concern. Aoife was towering over all of them; she was holding a roll of wrapping paper in one hand, obviously having just started to set about helping Ella wrap presents. And to Bella’s left stood her mother, Bernadette, whose face had paled to a ghostly shade of white.

Her mouth opened, but Malcolm met her stare, silently begging her to say nothing. “I...” she began. Malcolm tried to give a tiny shake of his head, but was too worried Bella would catch it to dare make it particularly visible. Bernadette, however, did cotton on to the idea that Bella did not know she was standing next to her father, and that he wanted it to stay that way. “I’ll go and make tea.”

Bella held out her hand and helped Malcolm to his feet, taking him into the living room. “Has that happened before?” she asked curiously.

“Only twice,” he mumbled, sitting down on the sofa. Alasdair and Eilidh had remained oblivious to what happened on the other side of the door; they were fixated on watching _The Polar Express_.

Malcolm held his silence as Aoife and Ella set about wrapping Sophie’s fairy door; Ella was so used to seeing this with her mother that, once he was calm, she did not fuss. To Ella, it was just something that happened to some people, and there was no need to handle them with kid gloves and cotton wool. Nicola had taken these attacks all of Ella’s life, and now the girl knew that the best way to be about it was to help achieve some calm and then move on. That, Malcolm realised, made her wiser than most adults.

Bernadette came back with three mugs of tea, and barely looked at Malcolm as she handed him his.

“This is Malcolm, by the way, Mum,” Bella said.

Malcolm cautiously held out his hand. “Bernadette,” she introduced herself, shaking his hand like they’d never met before now.

Bernadette had somehow managed to both change drastically and remain the same. She was no longer eighteen years old; her wild hair was not as brightly blonde as it once was, and small wrinkles had started to form around her green eyes. She looked like a mother, not a daughter. Bella, Malcolm suddenly recalled, had inherited her vivid blue eyes from her grandfather – Malcolm’s father. He didn’t know how he’d never seen it before. But Bernadette was still short, still assertive even in the way she stood. Her vibrant and austere demeanour had not changed in thirty-three years. And that was where Bella had found her curious ability to be charming and fucking terrifying at the same time.

The teeth came from Bernadette, too. She had that same flat, straight row of front teeth, the canines on either side apparently specially designed for tearing into human flesh. But the eyebrows, and the ability to glare up from under them, had to have come from Malcolm. Her jaw was soft, undefined, like Malcolm’s mother’s.

He found he could pinpoint just about every one of Bella’s attributes to himself, Bernadette, or one of their relatives.

They sat in near silence. Malcolm had no idea what he was supposed to say to Bernadette, and he suspected she was as clueless as he was. Eventually, when _The Polar Express_ ended, Bernadette busied herself with Eilidh and Alasdair rather than sit and try to keep her mouth shut. From behind the sofa she pulled up a cork board with a map of Britain and Ireland fixed to it, and place names in what had to be Scottish Gaelic on laminated strips, with blue tack on the back.

“Eilidh was in Gaelic medium on Skye,” explained Bella, “so we’re trying to make sure she keeps the basics.”

Malcolm shifted uncomfortably; moving here from a Gaelic medium school must have been a massive culture shift for Eilidh, and never would have been necessary if he’d not insisted Bella become Scottish Secretary.

“Edinburgh,” Bernadette said.

“Dùn Èideann!” Eilidh answered, pulling off the tab and sticking it beside the Firth of Forth.

“Um…Fort William?” Bella asked.

“An Gearasdan,” Eilidh rolled her eyes. She stuck the tab on the west of Scotland.

Bella looked round at Malcolm, clearly expecting him to come up with the next one. “Oh,” he said, pulling the mug away from his face. “London?”

“Lunnain,” Eilidh said. “That’s the easiest one!”

“Alright, madam,” Aoife piped up with a grin. “Since you’re so amazing at this, can you remember Dublin?”

Eilidh hesitated, looking up at the ceiling as she tried to recall it from her memory. “Baile…” she began cautiously. “Àtha…Cliath?”

“Very good!” Aoife exclaimed. “Have a sweetie,” she added, throwing a toffee finger from the Quality Street tin across the room to Eilidh.

Malcolm smiled slightly and drained his mug of tea; looking for any excuse to get out of there, he took it through to the kitchen to wash, and hopefully have the drain fucking swallow him up. He stood there, systematically wiping the soapy sponge over the mug, far longer than was required.

He jumped when the door behind him closed. Bernadette was advancing towards him, looking like she would gleefully break his skull into a hundred fucking pieces. “What the hell are you playing at?!” she hissed.

“I could ask you the fucking same thing!”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “I know you’re the government whip and she’s a Cabinet minister. I knew she’d have to work with you, and I let it happen, but did ye have to get so fucking pally with her?!”

“I didn’t fucking know who I was getting pally with!” Malcolm retorted, struggling to keep his voice at a volume that would not carry through the house. “How the fuck was I supposed to know? I only figured it out last fucking month! A year I went working with her, and you knew? And you never thought to try and make fucking contact to warn me?!”

“And say what?!” snarled Bernadette. “How could I trust you not to fuck it up?!”

Malcolm laughed, barely believing what he was hearing. “ _Me_ fucking it up?! You’re the one who had _my_ fucking child, told that child everything about me except my name and job description, but never fucking bothered to tell me I have a fucking daughter!”

“I was protecting you!”

“You were protecting yourself!” he shouted. He slammed his hand down on the counter, his temper finally getting the better of him. “You didn’t know what I’d do so you never gave me the fucking chance!”

All the resentment he felt towards Bernadette bubbled to the surface; no matter which way he tried to spin it, he could not make himself believe that her silence was entirely for his benefit. In all this, he was the one who lost the most. Bernadette did not bring Bella up without support. Before she had Gordon, she had her parents and her siblings for help, and Malcolm knew for a fact they were not the sort to disown her for getting pregnant. That family pulled together, closed ranks and defended one another, when faced with something like that. She had all the moral support she could have asked for.

But Malcolm had been unaware that he was a father for thirty-two years of his child’s life. As hard as he tried to justify it, he could not.

“The state of you, Malcolm!” Bernadette said. “You were barely fit for looking after yourself, never mind a bairn!”

“How do you know?” he growled at her. “How can you fucking stand there and say that when you never gave me the fucking option? Nobody knows how they would manage a thing like that until they have to get up and fucking do it! I’ve taken on Nicola’s kids, haven’t I?! I’m the fucking closest thing to a dad they’ve got!”

“You’re not the same man you were then!”

“I am!” Malcolm roared. “I’m the same angry, confused, fucking stumbling mess of a boy I was thirty years ago! I am the fucking same!”

The door flew open, and Euan Whyte came in the room and slammed the door behind him. “What the fuck’s goin’ on?” he demanded.

Malcolm glared at Bernadette. After all, this was her doing. This was down to her. The explanation had to come from her. “Nicola was fucking right,” muttered Malcolm. “Someone has to tell Bella the truth, and it had better be fucking you,” he spat at Bernadette.

He stalked past Euan and Bernadette and went back to the living room. Looking for something to do, he sat down on the floor and helped Ella wrap the gingerbread man tin she had got for Nicola, pressing his fingers and placing tape wherever his stepdaughter asked him to. He tried to care about what Bernadette might have been saying to Euan in the kitchen, but he couldn’t. His resolve to lie had broken, and it had taken seeing Bernadette’s defence of her own lies to break it.


	8. Earth-shattering

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I was very much torn on how to do this one, but this is eventually how I approached it. Thank you to everyone reading - your feedback is much appreciated! I hope you're continuing to enjoy it!

When Malcolm and Ella departed from the Whytes’ home, only Euan seemed to know something was amiss about his exchange with Bernadette. She had come back into the fold with the brightest smile and a flat-out pretence that no words had been exchanged between her and Malcolm. And though Euan seemed to understand all was not normal, because he did not know what exactly was going on, he refused to kick up fuck over it until he had the facts. He was also a Traveller and so Malcolm and Ella were outsiders, in front of whom he would never drag up family business; how was Euan to know that this particular piece of business had arisen because Malcolm was, technically, family?

They got to their own home to find Nicola, Ben and Sophie poking cloves into oranges with _Elf_ on in the background. The smell was infectious, spreading through the house like a gas leak. He did not mention anything about being at Bella’s except that he was there. Ella chose not to say anything about his attack, though he had not asked for her silence.

It was the last thing he wanted, to upset Nicola. He tried to downplay everything about today, careful not to remind her that Bella had her mother to stay; it did not seem to achieve what he had hoped. Every so often, he caught Nicola watching him through a wary and sympathetic gaze.

The kids didn’t go to bed until half past ten, knowing full well there was no school in the morning, and they only went quietly because they’d knackered themselves. Malcolm sat on the sofa with a glass of whisky, remembering just how easily he had lost his rag with Bernadette. He had thought he’d have been able to curb his temper, keep his anger to himself, but to hear her defend keeping Bella from him by saying he was not an able father had got on his last fucking nerve.

It didn’t bother Malcolm to be reminded he was quick-tempered; he had always known that, and he was always known for it. But that he had went in there with it in his head to stay courteous and civil, and it had only taken one conversation to defeat him…that bothered him.

Nicola returned from putting the children to bed, and cuddled into Malcolm. “Are you okay?” she asked him gently.

“Yeah,” he lied.

“Well, you’re lying,” she stated bluntly, “but if you want to say what’s wrong, I’m listening.”

He kissed her head, once again grateful that he had Nicola, who knew when to push his patience and when to simply hold him close. They didn’t need to speak. To have Nicola in his arms after a day so fucking mad was enough.

They’d only been sitting there for a quarter of an hour when the doorbell rang. Nicola, who had been falling asleep on Malcolm’s chest, jumped out of her skin. 

Nicola opened the door to Bella, her crazy hair littered with fresh snowflakes, her make up having run down her face. She wore no coat, only a vivid but paper-thin fleece that could not possibly have kept her warm. Her body swayed slightly, and Malcolm realised she was a little drunk. Not drunk enough to be unaware of her surroundings or a danger to anyone – he peered around her to make sure she had not taken her car over here – but she was definitely tipsy.

“Oh, Bella,” Nicola sighed, pulling the woman through the door. She shook Bella’s mane of curly blonde hair in her hands to get the snow off her. “What’s wrong?”

“They’re all lying to me,” Bella said. “And I don’t know about what. But they’re all acting fucking weird since Malcolm fell out with my mother.” Nicola glared at Malcolm, not because he had relented to his bitterness towards Bernadette, but because he hadn’t confided in her about it. “Mum won’t look me in the eye. Gordon’s hiding from me. Euan knows something has happened but he won’t tell me. I couldn’t take it anymore.”

So Bernadette hadn’t told Bella anything. Instead she had made her daughter uncomfortable in her own home, and she had ended up on her friends’ doorstep. Malcolm took Bella into the living room and sat her down on the sofa. His heart broke for her. She was so lost, and he could not give her the answer she needed. How could he tell her when he could not explain exactly what had happened? Only Bernadette, or perhaps Bernadette’s parents, could tell Bella the whole truth. There were too many gaps he could not fill with anything but conjecture, and conjecture would be completely fucking unhelpful at this late stage.

Nicola went through to the kitchen; Malcolm soon heard the kettle start to boil. Bella sat down next to Malcolm. “You’re the only one who really gives a single flying fuck about me,” she said.

He reached out and rubbed her arm gently. Her fleece was cold and wet from her walk between the train station and the house. She must have been freezing. Or perhaps she was used to the cold and didn’t notice. He pushed her hair behind her ear so she could see. “You know that’s not fucking true,” Malcolm said.

“Fucking feels like it,” Bella grumbled. She was more inebriated than Malcolm had first judged her to be; her words were slurring enough for her tone to lose its usual sharp edge. “They’re all plotting and lying and hiding things from me, I’m fucking sure of it.”

Malcolm sighed. “Bella, are you sure you’ve not just had a wee bit too much to drink and-”

“I wouldn’t be fucking drinking if they weren’t making me feel like a fucking intruder to whatever fucking secret they’re keeping!” she shouted. Her voice trembled, but Malcolm could not be sure if it was with emotion, drink or the cold.

He took her firmly by both arms. “Calm down!” he told her. “Nobody is fucking out to get you! And even if they were, I wouldn’t fucking let them get you, okay?!” He hadn’t meant to add that last bit aloud. Bella was stunned.

Before he could do anything about it, Bella lunged at him, kissing him hard on the lips. He tried to push her off without hurting her, but she was much stronger, heavier and more muscular than she looked. “Bella, no!” he shouted at her.

But someone had pulled Bella off him, and he was thankful he hadn’t been forced to throw her off and possibly hurt her. “No, no, no, Bella,” Nicola was saying, cradling Bella’s face in her hands. “I’m sorry, Malcolm,” she said, looking at him, “but this has gone far enough. It can’t continue.”

Dread flooded Malcolm, but he could not formulate a sentence coherent enough with which he could protest. Nicola had taken it all out of his hands; she was right. It had gone too far. But he had wanted Bernadette to do this, because she held the answers. Malcolm knew nothing of how this had happened other than that if he had known about it, it would never have happened.

“I’m sorry,” wept Bella. “I’m so sorry, Nicola, I don’t know what I was thinking. I know he loves you, and I know-”

“I don’t care about that,” Nicola brushed off the apology. She was not in the least bit angry. She had the empathy, the understanding of the human condition, to see that Bella was drunk, vulnerable and seeking comfort from the one person she had felt was on her side. That capacity for understanding over anger in these earth-shattering moments was something Malcolm didn’t think he could ever fully understand, let alone tap into himself.

“But I just tried to-”

Nicola shook Bella’s face gently and said, “He’s your father, Bella!”

Confusion spread across Bella’s face like poison in her veins. Malcolm went numb. “What?” Bella said. Malcolm got to his feet. “What are you talking about?” she laughed. There was no amusement or joy in that sound. It was made up purely of shock, scepticism and fear.

Nicola looked at Malcolm, who couldn’t do anything to help his fiancée or his daughter. He was powerless. Or at least, he felt it. “Malcolm is your dad, Bella,” Nicola repeated, staring Bella in the face, probably in the vain hope that it would make her statement any more believable. “So, yes, he loves you, but not in the way you’ve construed it.”

Bella, in her drunken condition, found this idea to be beyond the realms of her acceptance and understanding, and did what Malcolm did when he found he could not get to grips with his own world. She became very angry, very quickly. “You’re lying,” she snapped. “Mum always knew I worked with Malcolm. She would’ve told me. She would-”

“Stop, Bella!” Nicola exclaimed. “It’s true, okay? That’s why Malcolm had a row with your mum! There-”

Nicola was interrupted by Bella’s hand colliding with her face. Malcolm’s legs thawed and he jumped to his partner’s defence; he stood between Nicola and Bella, staring down at his daughter. Her cobalt blue eyes met his, and filled with tears as she realised the same thing Malcolm had realised weeks ago. She covered her mouth and nose with her hands and started to cry. With every sob that ripped through her, Malcolm’s own strength became more brittle, and his ability to hold his emotions in their cage diminished.

He didn’t know what to do. Here stood his daughter, and he loved her. He had loved her before he had known, having always been her friend. But she was his. He had a hand in producing this amazing thing – another human being – and he had to love her. His instinct was to love her. But his fear of rejection prevented him from reaching out and trying to comfort her. Bella was the first person who’d ever made him care about the idea of being rejected; normally, particularly at work, he was neither here nor there about it. In fact, if certain people in his professional circle rejected him, it probably meant he was doing something right. But his own daughter rejecting him? No. He could not risk it.

Nicola stepped around Malcolm and took Bella into her arms. “Shh,” she hushed her quietly. Bella was inconsolable. She just kept crying, and nothing Nicola did calmed her at all. “Do something,” she mouthed at Malcolm. “She’s your fucking daughter!”

Terrified, he put his hand in Bella’s hair and stroked it gently. “Bella,” he said quietly. She looked up from Nicola’s chest, though Bella did not leave her arms and did not stop crying. “I wanted to tell you the truth, but there’s so much I can’t fucking tell you. I don’t know everything myself, and I don’t want to give you half the story. It was better to keep my mouth shut because I might have made everything fucking worse.”

“When did you find out?” Bella asked. Her tears did not stop, but she could speak.

“The day after my birthday, when you were telling me everything your mother told you,” he said. “It all added up to…well, your mum all but fucking told me today.”

Bella gasped quietly. “You fucking overturned your office that day.”

“I lost it,” he confessed. “I didn’t know how to deal with it and I fucking lost it.”

Bella wiped her eyes and stood up straight. “Tell me what you can tell me.”

“I can’t tell you much,” he warned her. “I didn’t even know your mother was pregnant when I left Skye. There was no letter, no phone call, nothing,” he explained. “If I’d known, Bella, I would have been there for you.”

He found as he said it that it was the truth. Even as a teenager, he would never have abandoned any child. After all, he knew what it was to lose a parent far too early. No child of his would ever have been left to be without him, no matter what the cost. He was not that man who walked away from his child, and he never had been. He’d grown up around young children who had no father, who were the product of one night stands or had a father who couldn’t hack it and fucked off when they were too young to even know it. Those kids were as angry and as damaged as he became at sixteen through grief, but they lived their whole childhoods like that – grieving for someone who was still alive. He never would have made any child of his endure that. Perhaps that was why he found himself so dedicated to Nicola’s children, after seeing what happens when children lose a parent through that parent’s choices.

“I took to you instantly, you know,” Bella said to him. “I never take to anybody that quickly. It’s odd, isn’t it?”

“That’s one fucking word for it.”

Bella reached out and touched his hand with her fingers. “I have a dad,” she whispered. Suddenly, a look of horror found its way to her face. “And Jesus fucking Christ, I tried to kiss him. I _did_ fucking kiss him.”

Malcolm let out a chuckle, and he could hear his own nerves in it. “It’s okay. How were you to fucking know?”

Nicola sighed and said, “Your mum needs to tell you the truth. I think you need to hear it from her.” Bella nodded but did not say anything. “But right now,” Nicola added, “you are drunk, you are upset, and there’s a blizzard outside. You’re going fucking nowhere tonight. You can sleep in the spare room.”

“No, no,” Bella waved away the offer, not understanding as Malcolm did that it wasn’t an offer at all, but an order. “I can get home.”

Nicola raised an eyebrow at Bella and picked up a mug from the coffee table. “Do you know who I am?”

Bella frowned. “What?”

“I’m your fucking stepmother,” she said, handing Bella the mug of tea. “So do as you’re told, sit down and drink your bloody tea.” Bella fell speechless and accepted her tea and a place on the sofa.

Malcolm, his head pounding and his hands shaking, walked out of the room and went to the kitchen. He leaned over the counter and closed his eyes, willing his blood pressure to fall back to something close to a fucking normal level. The stress of what had just happened finally hit him, along with the notion that Bella knew who and what he was to her, and the door to that internal cage burst open. The first tear fell despite his effort to try and slam the cage door shut.

Nothing was ever going to be the same. And how was he going to explain to Ella, Sophie and Ben that they had a stepsister, fourteen months after they had lost their own eldest sister? How was he supposed to explain to Eilidh and Alasdair that he was their grandfather?

He almost wished he had never discovered the truth. He could have carried on blindly, never knowing that the Scottish Secretary was his daughter. It could have stayed the same, without all this heartache and mess. But he would not have his daughter. He would only have had a colleague and friend, but not his daughter. And Malcolm could not bring himself to wish he didn’t have Bella for a daughter.

“Malcolm?” Nicola asked from behind him. “Malcolm, I’m sorry, but it had to happen. The damage we could have done if we-”

“I know,” he assured her. He wiped his face, only for new tears to replace those that had just been dried. “I know, Nic’la.”

She tugged his arm, and he turned to face her. “She’s not angry,” Nicola reminded him. “Not at you, anyway. I think Bernadette might have a few fucking questions to answer. But, Malcolm, it’s okay. You’re still standing. Bella’s still standing. I’m still standing. It’s going to be alright.”

Her words didn’t do anything to halt the flood of emotion that he’d allowed to run through him. He didn’t cope well with these situations, and he knew Nicola understood that. Give him a politician who needed sacked in the most underhanded way possible, and he was fucking thriving. Give him a daughter, and he was fucking lost. “Oh, Malcolm,” sighed Nicola. He felt her hook an arm around his neck and put a hand on the back of his head, and she drew him down so his face was buried into her neck. “Just let it out, my love. Nothing worse than letting it turn inwards.”

Malcolm had never been so grateful for Nicola. She had done what he could not. She had put an end to the secrets and lies. Rather than let it spiral one step further out of control, she had broken his world. She was, in this department, far wiser than he could ever have hoped to be. Without Nicola, he dreaded to think what might have happened. Bernadette may never have told Bella anything, and Bella may have gone home to Euan and told him she had drunkenly tried to kiss Malcolm. And he may not have done anything to stop her doing that.

But Nicola had put her foot down. Malcolm was not an idiot – he knew she had probably just saved him from a massive amount of suffering. And it had to have been hard for Nicola to do. It was not in her nature to take control of a situation; that was what so often landed her in fucking hot water at DoSAC. It was also not in her nature to take Malcolm’s control of a situation away from him. She had gone against her own core instinct to save him and his daughter from any further distress.

Nicola had done everything in her power – and even that which was not normally a power within her personality – to protect Malcolm from harm.

In his appreciation, Malcolm hugged Nicola so tightly that he doubted they could have been any closer if they tried. “I love you,” he mumbled into her neck. “I don’t tell you nearly often enough, but I love you.”


	9. The Christmas Party

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hellooooooo again! This has taken ages. Sorry. I got distracted with another idea, plus university work, plus I'm in the process of moving out of my mother's house and into my own flat, plus yesterday was my twenty-second birthday, which went all to shit because my stepdad is an utter twat. Anyway. Here goes.

The Cabinet Christmas party took place the following night. Malcolm had been reluctant to go at all, but Nicola reminded him he had to go. He was expected to go, and he couldn’t really get away with not going. Jamie wanted him there. And Bella was bound to be going, so Malcolm needed to go and make sure she didn’t drunkenly tell half the Cabinet she was the daughter of the Prime Minister's fucking chief enforcer.

But when he walked into that party, there was no sign of Bella Whyte. It was Jamie McDonald who explained her absence – “Bella’s gone up to Forfar to see her aunt. Took the train up tae Dundee this afternoon.”

Kathleen. Malcolm didn’t doubt Bella had gone up there to force out of Kathleen what she couldn’t drag out of her mother and grandmother. There was no point in even asking the men in her family for the truth, because they probably didn’t even know the whole truth. That was the thing Malcolm found bizarre about the Highland Travellers; their setup was quite matriarchal, and if a man, in their view, didn’t need to know something, they never found out about it.

Malcolm, when reunited with Nicola well into the party at about eleven o’clock, confided his worries to her. “She’s away seeing Kathleen,” he explained, his voice hushed.

“Malcolm, there’s nothing you can do,” Nicola said, sipping from her glass of orange juice. “Bella is a grown woman. You can’t control what she does any more than I can. If she needs answers you can’t give, and Bernadette won’t tell her anything, of course she’s going to try and get it out of someone else.”

She smiled and rubbed his arm gently. For a moment, he looked his fiancée up and down, fully appreciating how beautiful she looked in that dark purple knee-length dress. Its neckline plunged just far enough to see her cleavage, and the skirt floated gently around her hips with her every move.

“It’s not that,” he whispered. “The train doesn’t go to Forfar and-” He was suddenly distracted, however, by the contents of her glass. “Why aren’t you drinking?”

“Just don’t feel like it,” she shrugged.

Malcolm laughed. “You, not drinking at Christmas?”

“Pot and kettle, Malcolm,” she quipped.

Malcolm stared at her. She was evading his question, and he knew her well enough to know that was never good. The last time, she nearly died, and he could not bear the thought of losing her. “Don’t fucking lie to me,” he warned her.

“Again, pot and fucking kettle,” she snarled.

He frowned at her. Glared at her. She remained silent. He took her by the hand and frogmarched her out of the crowd of the party; he was not going through this whole fucking party with something wedged between them. When they ended up in a deserted and unused cloakroom, he rounded on her. “Nic’la, tell me the truth.”

She gazed up at her, the colour of her eyes changing with her heart. “I just don’t want to be hungover with the kids on Christmas Eve,” she said. “That’s all. When did you turn into such a fucking worrier?” she smiled.

In his head, he answered with a reminder that she had nearly killed herself last year, and she had never quite come to terms with losing Katie, and that her husband had once tried to kill her, and that even before all that, she was known for being a hot mess of anxiety and claustrophobia anyway. But these were all things Nicola knew, and he didn’t need to tell her again. As much as he hated not being able to read her mind, he accepted that he just couldn’t; all he had was her word, and until he had any evidence to contradict her, he had to assume she told him the truth.

She kissed him, and that was his evidence. His evidence was this kiss, so like the one she had given him the night she had ended up on the kitchen floor with a rope in her hand; it was her lie, but it was also what betrayed her. He had never told her that, because he had wanted to keep one tool to himself – a behaviour she did not know to change when she wanted to convince him of a lie. He had never told her there was a certain way she kissed him when she was trying to hide something.

But he wasn’t going to get it out of her, and he couldn’t cause a scene where other Cabinet ministers and their staff might walk in on them, or, God forbid, the Prime Minister might hear one of their inevitable domestics. Tom was still not convinced that Malcolm’s relationship with Nicola was a wise idea, but Tom wasn’t fucking wise himself and therefore had no standing to tell anyone else their actions were unwise.

So Malcolm let Nicola lie for now, and kissed her as fiercely as she kissed him. Her hands were tangled in his hair; he let his own hand drifted down her waist and under the skirt of her dress. He could feel her grin against his lips when he slowly inched his hand up her thigh, until he reached the scar left by James’ knife. He rubbed it gently with his thumb, allowing himself the reminder that though this woman was irreparably damaged – as, it could be argued, was he – she was the toughest, bravest woman he could have hoped to love.

“Malcolm, what if someone comes in here?!”

“That’s the fucking plan,” he grinned.

“I’m serious, you fucking twat!”

“Lock the door, then,” he challenged her, knowing that she couldn’t.

“Oh, let them fucking walk in,” she sighed between harsh, aching kisses. “It’s not like they don’t already know.”

He kissed her neck until he heard her let out a soft, low moan, and traced his fingers down her bare chest until he found her breast, cupping it in his hand. “Malcolm,” she breathed. He moved his hand from her scar to the inside of her thigh and kissed her jaw, listening with satisfaction as her breathing lost its even step as her heart missed a beat.

“You’re not wearing tights,” he scolded her gently. “It’s fucking freezing out there.”

“Thought you were a hardy Scot and you don’t feel the cold,” she whispered in his ear, her lips grazing his jawbone as she pulled his shirt out from the security of his belt.

“Aye, but I’m fully clothed,” he smirked. His fingers slid under the elastic of her knickers, eliciting a gasp from her lips as they rested against his ear. She was most fun when she was like this – on edge with the idea of someone walking in. It released a reckless and playful side to her that Malcolm doubted anyone had guessed she had.

“If this dress comes off, I don’t think it’ll go back on without a fight,” Nicola warned him as she kicked her shoes off.

Malcolm pushed her against the wall, and her knees buckled slightly. Her hands made quick work of his belt buckle and, before long, her fingers were around his already throbbing cock. He groaned quietly as she teased him, slowly moving up and down, probably getting her own back for landing them in this fucking compromising situation in the first place.

He scooped her up and placed her horizontal on the floor, leaving her in a fit of giggles as he leaned over her and kissed her warm chest, his hand anxious to find her pants and fucking do away with them.

“OH, FOR FUCK’S SAKE!” a voice shouted from the door. “Ugh, Jesus fuck, min!”

Malcolm looked up to find Jamie McDonald standing at the now open door, his hand covering his eyes. He glanced at the woman lying on the floor between his legs; she was stifling very fucking unhelpful laughter. “Shut up,” hissed Malcolm, though he did smirk. The look on Jamie’s face was fucking hilarious.

They scrambled to make themselves decent again, and while Nicola put her shoes back on, Jamie demanded, “Are your knickers still around your fucking ankles, Nicola, or can I open my eyes without needing fucking therapy for the next fucking decade?!”

“Oh, grow up,” Nicola giggled. “But yes, we’re both fully clothed.”

Jamie uncovered his eyes with a look of disgust. “Malcolm, the BBC just called,” he said. “Apparently Bella Whyte’s been taken to Ninewells.”

Malcolm felt the smile fall from his face. “What?”

“She was found on the B9128, between Muirdrum and Craichie. Sounds like she got off the train at Carnoustie and tried to walk to Forfar, and collapsed in the snow. There’s about fourteen inches of it up there.”

“Does Euan know?” Malcolm asked; Nicola’s hand took his and gripped tightly. “How does the fucking BBC know?”

“The fucking halfwit that found her put it on fucking Twitter that he’s just found the Scottish Secretary passed out on the side of the road with a half empty bottle in her hand,” spat Jamie. “I called the police station up in Forfar and they said her next of kin has been informed, and then I called Ninewells, and they said she’s in Intensive Care, critical but stable. Listen, if you want to go, I can fucking deal with the press,” he offered.

“I-” Malcolm hesitated. He was in limbo – he was her father but not her dad. And Bernadette surely would not want him there. Euan might want him there, especially if he was taking Eilidh and Alasdair up with him. Fuck knows what Kathleen would have wanted. He looked at Nicola. If ever there was a time he needed her, it was now.

“We’ll go home, get changed,” Nicola said, “and while we’re in the taxi you can phone Euan and the hospital, and if you decide to go, I’ll drive you. Mum won’t mind staying with the kids.”

Slightly dazed but determined to function, he nodded. The three of them tried to organise a taxi with as little fuss as possible, and while they waited, Malcolm watched within earshot as Jamie broke the news to the Prime Minister that Bella was in critical condition in Ninewells. Tom ran his face over his hands and gave Jamie the order to get Malcolm to deal with it.

“Malcolm can’t,” Jamie said. “He’s had way too much to drink to be dealing with the Daily fucking Mail. He’ll only lose the heid wi’ them,” he lied. And so Tom relented and told Jamie to draft a statement.

Nicola pulled Malcolm into a taxi while he found Euan’s number. “What’s the number for Ninewells?” Nicola asked, taking her own phone out of her bag.

“Oh-one-three-eight-two,” Malcolm reeled off, before he realised the flaw in their arrangement of who would phone who. “You can’t. They won’t tell you anything,” he said. “It’s fucking got to be me – at least I can say I’m her father.”

“Okay,” Nicola said calmly. “You call Ninewells, and I’ll call Euan.”

Malcolm called the number for Ninewells Hospital, knowing it off the cuff from when his old university mate ended up in there after an engine fell on his knees on a farm outside Arbroath about six years previous. “Hello,” said the voice of a young man. “Ninewells Hospital, how can I help?”

“I’m calling to check on the condition of Bella Whyte,” Malcolm said, fighting to keep back the stream of expletives he’d have used if it wasn’t expected of him to remain polite and cool. “She’s my daughter,” he added, unsure as he was whether to refer to himself as her father or her dad.

“May I take your name?”

“Malcolm Tucker.”

“Thank you, Mr. Tucker. Just give me a moment and I’ll connect you to the ward.”

There was another dialling tone, and this time a woman answered. “Hello, Ninewells Intensive Care, Nurse MacLean speaking.”

“Hi,” Malcolm said. “I’d like to check on my daughter’s condition. Bella Whyte.”

“Date of birth?”

“Two-six-seventy-eight,” he recited.

“What’s your name, please?”

Malcolm rolled his eyes. “Malcolm Tucker.”

“Okay, Mr. Tucker,” Nurse MacLean began. “Your daughter was found by the side of the road near Craichie. She’s had a lot to drink. We’re not sure how long she was in the snow, but she wasn’t properly dressed for it. Right now, we’re trying to get her body temperature up.”

“Hypothermia?”

“I’m afraid so, Mr. Tucker. The paramedics recorded her temperature at the scene as thirty-one point six. We’re kind of hoping she it was the alcohol that made her pass out rather than the hypothermia. Her temperature is now thirty-three point one.”

Malcom leaned forwards and put his head in his hands; he felt Nicola rubbing his back as she spoke to Euan. “I’m in London at the moment, but my fiancée says she’ll drive me up. Can I see Bella?”

“She may well be awake by the time you arrive, but yes,” Nurse MacLean said. “I believe her husband is driving up as well.”

“Okay, thank you,” Malcolm said. “Listen, if she wakes up, can you ring me?”

“Aye,” she answered. “What’s your number?”

He rattled off the eleven numbers, thanked her again and hung up.

Nicola was still speaking to Euan. “So you’re alright with Malcolm coming up to see her?” she asked, waiting on the reply. “Okay, I’ll see you up there. Yeah. Take care, Euan.”

She hung up and said, “Euan’s fine with us going up. Bella told him everything before she went up to Scotland; he’s fucking fuming with Bernadette. He’s made her stay with the kids, but he’s taken Aoife instead, because he doesn’t want to leave her in that situation with Bernadette. Apparently she refused to speak about anything so Bella lost her temper and got on the train to Scotland.”

Fucking Bernadette. If that idiot woman’s fucking pride had got in the way and caused Bella to get herself in this state, he’d fucking kill her himself.


	10. The Mystery of Mirtazapine

Malcolm got Nicola out of her dress, threw jeans and a jumper on himself, brushed his teeth, packed a spare outfit, hugged the children goodnight and got down the stairs in record time. Nicola only beat him down there because she had the advantage of sobriety. Though they had argued over it, and though having Nicola drive him to Scotland was sure to be mind-meltingly stressful, he had to be thankful for the fact she had no alcohol in her system.

“…can’t take them when I’m about to drive all night!” he heard Nicola hiss. He paused at the living room door. The door was slightly ajar; Nicola and her mother, Victoria, were standing in front of the dying fire, clearly having a fucking heated discussion.

“You also can’t just _not take them_ , Nicola!” Victoria chastised her, shaking a box of pills at her. “You have-”

“I know what I fucking have, Mum!” snapped Nicola. She snatched the pills out of her mother’s hands and put them into a large make-up bag. “I don’t need reminded every other minute of the fucking day!”

“I’m worried,” Victoria whispered. “I’ll never _not_ be a doctor. You know that.”

Nicola shook her head to herself, packing the make-up bag into a neon pink backpack she had borrowed out of Ella’s wardrobe.

“Look, I’m only skipping one,” Nicola said. “It’s not going to kill me. However, driving up to Dundee while drowsy _might_ fucking kill me, and Malcolm into the bargain!”

Malcolm let his head fall against the wall. She was ill. Nicola was ill, and she hadn’t told him. In fact, she had actively hidden it from him.

“You need to take your other ones tomorrow, Nicola,” Victoria insisted firmly. “Seriously. You can’t fuck about with those things. It’s one thing to skip mirtazapine, but skipping your-”

“Mum!” snarled Nicola. “Keep your fucking voice down!”

“Promise me you’ll take it tomorrow, at the right time, in the right way, and that you won’t miss another one of _these_ to drive overnight.”

“If I can get out of Malcolm’s sight, then yes, I’ll take them properly. I’m not a fucking child, Mum! I have read the fucking labels on these bloody monstrous pills. They make me feel fucking worse than anything else,” Nicola replied heavily. She sounded tired and impatient. “Pills to counteract the side effects of pills, then fucking painkillers on top of that, and then another pill to negate the fucking crippling-” she complained, but she stopped herself. “I swear, if you shook me, I’d sound like a fucking baby’s rattle.”

“I wish you’d tell him the truth,” sighed Victoria. “Lying to him is just another stress on you.”

“He’s got enough to deal with. Fucking Bella in hospital, and Bernadette causing no end to fucking problems. He’ll only flip the lid.”

“Well, in eleven weeks’ time, he’s going to have three kids to look after, as well as a fucking hospitalised fiancée,” Victoria growled. “You might be able to hide it just now, while it’s all pills and slipping out for consultations, but when the fucking ugly stuff starts, Nicola, he’s going to have to fucking know!”

“And what if he walks out, Mum?!” Nicola quietly demanded. “What if he-”

“That man’s not going fucking anywhere!” Victoria laughed incredulously. “He’s stuck by you through Katie’s death, James and his fucking insanity, depression and your fucking anxiety issues…what the fucking hell makes you think he’ll abandon you?!”

“There’s no reason for him to stay.”

“You don’t believe that,” Victoria stated curtly. “For the very simple reason that it’s not true. That man loves the bones of you, Nicola Eleanor Stephen!”

Full maiden name. Victoria fucking meant business, then.

Malcolm stood up straight, slung his overnight bag over his shoulder and said, like he’d not lurked behind the door, “Ready, Nic’la? We’ll take my car. It’s better in the snow.”

Nicola’s smile was gentle – deliberately serene – but her eyes gave her away. “Ready to drive to Scotland in the snow?” Nicola asked. “Not really, but I’m sure you’ll keep me on the right road.” She had changed into a loose t-shirt, jeans and trainers, and Malcolm still found her as beautiful as she had been in that dress he’d nearly had off her in the cloakroom earlier. No matter what she wore, she was Nicola.

She turned to her mother, who said, “Drive carefully. If you need to stop, Nicola, you stop.”

“I know, Mum,” Nicola rolled her eyes. She threw herself onto Victoria, clearly hugging her mum with every ounce of her strength. Malcolm knew that embrace all too well, even from a distance.

Nicola stepped into the hallway and picked up the keys. Victoria took Malcolm into her arms and held him tight, rubbing his back slightly. “Bella will be alright, Malcolm,” she assured him. “Her temperature’s going up. That’s a good sign.”

“I know,” he sighed.

“Look after Nicola, Malcolm,” Victoria said. “Just look after my girl for me.”

“I will.”

“How much of that did you hear?”

“More than enough,” he whispered. “But I won’t ask you, because I know what you’ll say. It’s-”

“Not my place,” Victoria finished for him.

He patted her back, knowing perfectly well that Victoria’s principles didn’t allow her to give up Nicola’s secrets, even to him. He released her and followed Nicola to the car, watching her intently. She was tired, but tried to hide it.

Worried as he was about Bella, he knew she was in a place of safety; Victoria was right – it was good that Bella’s temperature had responded to efforts to raise it and, if he thought about it rationally, he knew she had a decent chance of being okay. It didn’t change his need to see her, to be there for her, and that was partly because he had helped upset her so much that she tried to walk from Carnoustie to Forfar, drunk, at night, and in the snow. He could blame Bernadette all he wanted, but his reactions had triggered this as much as hers did.

But Nicola…what was wrong with Nicola that meant she had to be dosed up with what sounded like every pill known to fucking humanity?

_“Well, in eleven weeks’ time, he’s going to have three kids to look after, as well as a fucking hospitalised fiancée.”_

Hospitalised. They were expecting Nicola to be hospitalised. They knew she was going to end up in fucking hospital, and Nicola never said a fucking word to him. In fact, she had hidden it so well that if he hadn’t noticed her avoiding alcohol and he hadn’t heard that conversation, he’d have been none the fucking wiser. It angered him. The idea that he might run away if she were ill, that he would not take care of her, that he would abandon the children…did she fucking know him at all? Had she learned fucking nothing about him in the past fucking fourteen months?

He was tempted to reach back to Ben’s car seat and grab her rucksack, and see exactly what drugs she was supposed to be taking. The only thing stopping him was knowing Nicola fucking needed to concentrate on driving without getting them both killed.

The only medical term he had picked up was the name of a drug: mirtazapine. What was that for? Obviously, it caused drowsiness, or else Nicola wouldn’t have refused to take it before driving.

He loved her. Christ, he loved her. But right now, he was extremely fucking angry with her, and not least for lying to him. She had chosen to hide what obviously had to be a serious fucking illness because she didn’t fucking trust him not to lose his nerve and fuck off. How could she ever think he would do that?

“Get the SatNav out the glove compartment, Malcolm,” Nicola told him.

Silently, he took out the machine, only to realise he didn’t know the postcode for Ninewells. He did, however, have his phone, and Googled it. “D-D-two,” he muttered, glancing between the two screens, “one-U-B.”

The SatNav beeped and started to give Nicola instructions. “Right, get some sleep,” she ordered. “’Cause if you think I’m putting up with you tired on top of everything else, you can fucking think again.”

Malcolm, not in the humour to engage with her at all, leaned back in the passenger and closed his eyes. Fuck this. Fuck all of this. Fuck Bernadette for not telling him he fucking had a child. Fuck Nicola for lying to him about whatever was fucking wrong with her. Fuck Bella for being so fucking stupid that she got drunk in the height of Scottish winter and tried to walk the Angus back roads.

It was all he could do not to say those things aloud. He was so fucking angry that he thought he was going to explode. It was a fucking good thing they'd got the SatNav set up. He did not think he possessed even a fraction of the patience required to give Nicola Murray directions from London to Dundee. One of them would have ended up fucking dead. But the intermittent lights and the low music from the radio lulled him into an unwilling sleep where the stress of what plagued his waking hours could be forgotten.

* * *

 

The sunlight glared through the windows, forcing him to squint into it in order to see outside. It was the chapel – the one they’d used for Katie Murray’s funeral. His footsteps echoed. He was completely alone. There was absolutely nobody in sight. Not even a vicar. The cold air nipped his fingertips, so he pulled his coat sleeves over his hands.

He looked around him, the stain glass turning the sunlight into paint in the air. The dust danced in the light with no intentions of falling to Earth. He walked up the aisle, the hard floor beneath his feet reverberating his every step between the walls. There was nothing and nobody at the altar, so he paced back through the chapel to the doors, out into the crisp winter air.

There was no snow on the ground, but he could feel the ice in the air. There were patches on the footpath; he felt compelled to follow the route of those patches. He turned right, and then left, then left again, at the command of those glistening puddles, until he arrived at a gravestone. Katie’s gravestone. He’d visited almost weekly with Nicola. He knew every inch of it, and yet had never even seen the girl alive. That was something that occasionally crossed his mind. What would Katie have thought of him? Would she have accepted him? Would she have condemned her father, or would she have taken James’ side? Nicola always maintained that Katie would have disowned James for his violent behaviour. Malcolm liked to believe she was right.

But there was another name, below Katie’s on the gravestone.

Nicola Eleanor Tucker.

Malcolm kneeled onto the brittle grass, touching the frozen flowers gently, his heart in his mouth. This was wrong. Nicola could not be gone. Not already. Not before he’d even had a chance to confront her.

“Malcolm!”

He looked over his shoulder, to find row upon row of gravestone behind him, the graveyard completely empty but for his presence.

“Malcolm! Malcolm, wake up!”

It was still dark.

When he glanced at his surroundings, relief washed over him as he found he was in a car – his own car – and Nicola was driving. She was okay. She was not in the ground.

“We’re just past Perth, Malcolm,” Nicola said. “I thought we could stop somewhere and get you something to eat. You’ve not had anything since yesterday afternoon.”

“Uh, yeah, stop at one of the bakers on the way into Dundee and we’ll get a roll,” he said groggily.

“Which one?”

“Any one,” Malcolm shrugged. “There’s fucking shit loads of them in Dundee.”

But when, half an hour later, they got out the car at a bakery, Nicola refused food. She ordered coffee, but nothing solid. “Nic’la, you’ve not eaten either,” he reminded her.

“Oh, I’m fine,” she waved away his concern. “I’ll get something later on.”

Malcolm didn’t have the energy to argue. He’d wasted it all being angry, and afraid, and fucking having nightmares about fucking gravestones. He bit into his lorne roll, only knowing now just how fucking hungry he was. And if he was hungry, Nicola, who generally could eat him under the table and had pulled an all-nighter to get him up here, had to have been fucking starving. But she drove stony-faced, pale and exhausted, but did not complain once. That in itself was not normal; Nicola fucking loved to complain. She thoroughly enjoyed a little rant in which she could vent her feelings about whatever fucking bothered her, whether it was hunger, a hangover, the kids, the party, the fucking world in general…since when did Nicola keep this silent?

Once she parked the car, they walked slowly up the sloping tunnel that led them to the main entrance of Ninewells Hospital. The unmistakable clinical scent of a hospital assaulted his senses. Nicola took his hand and shifted her backpack into a more comfortable position. “Right, let’s find Intensive Care,” she smiled.

However, when they went to turn the corner at the end of the hall, they were met with Aoife, who carried two paper cups in her hands. Malcolm held the door open for her and followed her down the next corridor. “They’ve moved her,” Aoife explained. “She’s awake, and her temperature’s above thirty-five, so they’ve moved her to a ward for observation.” Malcolm exhaled, relieved that he wasn’t going to have to sit awkwardly at the bedside of a woman who could not respond. “But a word to the wise,” Aoife added. “She doesn’t need another bollocking. Euan’s already well and truly done that.”

“Right,” Malcolm muttered. He forced his emotions down, so that he could go in there without reminding Bella what a fucking stupid thing she had done. She wasn’t a stupid woman – she probably knew it was an idiotic thing to do, anyway.

“Oh, and her Auntie Kathleen is here,” she added. “She’s really scary. Hair pinned into this feckin’ Victorian knot thing.”

“I fucking remember,” grumbled Malcolm. If he knew Kathleen at all, he could guess that her hairstyle was the same as her fucking granny’s, and hadn’t changed at all in the last three decades. Kathleen was Bernadette’s complete opposite; she was a woman of unwavering discipline and, though not unkind, came over like she might slap someone at any given moment. He had no idea what she would do when she saw him. Really, Malcolm was just thankful the reunion was to take place on a hospital ward and not some secluded Traveller’s camp in a bloody clearing deep into the forest.

They reached the doors to the ward, and Nicola fell back, pink rucksack still slung on her shoulder. “You, uh, you go ahead, Malcolm,” she said. “I’m going to get another cup of coffee. Fucking keep me awake after all that driving.”

He frowned but nodded, and kissed her gently, before he followed Aoife into the fray of angry Travellers. In Malcolm’s experience, there was nothing more fucking terrifying than angry Traveller women, and he was about to face two of them, and that was before he even thought about Euan’s frame of mind. But, it had to be fucking done, didn’t it?


	11. Sick and Tired

“Malcolm,” Bella smiled weakly as he crossed the ward to her bedside. She looked tired, and she was on an IV drip, but she was awake, and she was speaking. It could only be a positive thing. “You didn’t have to come all the way up here.”

“Malcolm Tucker?” asked a woman in her fifties, her dark hair pinned neatly and tightly back. Malcolm looked her dead in the eyes, seeing the deep brown, so unlike her niece’s, scrutinising him. “Bella, d’ye jan thon cowie?” she asked, never taking her eyes off Malcolm.

“Aye, Kathleen,” Bella said. “I work with him. I ken exactly who he is. And nix mang ‘boot the cowie afore ‘um.”

“Kathleen Stewart,” Malcolm said, holding his hand out. “Last time I saw you, you had the worst hangover in the history of mankind and a waitressing shift ahead of you.”

“I’m Kathleen Townsley now,” she replied, shaking his hand firmly. “Married Johnny Townsley just before Bella was born,” she told him, speaking perfect English. He had always been slightly awed by their ability to flit between English, Scots and their own language. Bella even added Gaelic into that, and switched between four languages as she pleased. “Ye’ll mind o’ him, Malcolm. He’s the one that pulled you oot the River Sligachan when you lost your footin’ and fell face first.”

He did remember Johnny. The man was a few years older than Malcolm, and, as he recalled, much larger. He was a Traveller, who had come up with Kathleen to Skye when she visited on days off, and who liked a drink just a wee bit too fucking much. That day Malcolm had fallen into the Sligachan while messing about on the protruding rocks with Johnny, Kathleen, Bernadette, Alec and Hendry. They’d all been a little drunk, but the heat of that particular day had taken its toll on Malcolm and caused the alcohol to have a far greater effect. He had slipped one of the rocks and couldn’t get back up. He vividly remembered Johnny Townsley hauling him to the bank while he coughed up the water he had inhaled.

But now, in the dead of winter, Kathleen stared at him with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity.

“The doctors say if my temperature reaches thirty-seven and the scan comes back clear, I can go home to the kids,” Bella said. Malcolm tore his gaze from Kathleen to look at Bella. She was upbeat, though Malcolm could tell it wasn’t exactly how she felt. There was still a hurt lingering in her face that worried him. “I don’t want to be stuck in here on Christmas Day.”

“Nobody wants that,” Euan said gently.

“And I’ll be having words with my fucking mother when I get home, too,” Bella grumbled. She stared up at Malcolm. “Kathleen told me everything, Malcolm. Mum really was trying to protect you, you know. Just so happens she hurt you more than if she hadn’t tried.”

He turned back to Kathleen. “That true?” he asked.

“Aye, Malcolm,” she sighed. “I tried to get her and Ma tae contact you, but they seemed to think the last thing you needed was a bairn. Bernadette was scared it would put you off the rails, and Ma said the best thing to do was to just not say a word. And you know Ma – even now, if she says to do something, we bloody do it.”

In a strange way, this news, this confirmation from someone who was directly involved in making that decision, settled him. He was still angry about the way it was done, and he still felt double-crossed and lied to, but their motive was to protect both him and Bella. And in fairness, he had not been a stable young man. He wasn’t a stable middle-aged man, either, and he had barely changed in that respect. But he had learned valuable lessons, even in the course of the last year, and could understand that what was right back then, in the eyes of those three women, was no longer right.

“I’m gonnae phone Bernadette later,” Kathleen added. “Tell her she needs to sort this out before it hurts anybody else. The secret’s out, after all.”

Malcolm allowed a small, momentary smile, but didn’t say anything.

Bella looked around her suddenly. “Where’s Nicola?” she asked.

“Away getting coffee,” Malcolm said. “She’s been driving all night.”

Bella nodded. “Look, I don’t suppose you could go into the town for me?” she asked. “This bampot,” she jabbed a thumb at Euan, who smiled sheepishly, “drove all the way from fucking London and forgot to take any of my stuff. I just need some clothes to go home in. Mine are all dirt.”

“Of course,” Malcolm said.

Bella grinned, baring her sharp teeth; her eyes, though intensely bright, were soft. For the first time, Malcolm saw a fleeting glimpse of what he could have with Bella. This was the sort of thing Ella would have asked of him. It was what daughters expected of their dads – to be looked after when the situation was dire.

Ella and Bella. He hadn’t noticed the ring to their names before now. Christ, that could get old very fucking quickly. He made a mental note never to say it in front of Ben or Sophie, for they were sure to make a catchphrase of it.

His thoughts were broken by a commotion at the door of the ward. He looked around to see a man and a woman in their thirties, both layered up to the nines in jumpers and body warmers, asking loudly for Bella Whyte. “Wullie, Neltie!” Bella exclaimed. “Christ, I’ve no deeked at yehs since we wur kinchins!”

Malcolm suddenly realised, as Wullie and Neltie approached, that _he_ was now the minority; in a group of seven, only he and Aoife were not Travellers. He caught sight of a nurse frowning, and decided to take his leave before she came over to chuck them all out. The ward seemed fairly relaxed, but Nicola was bound to join them soon, and eight people around one bed was just taking the piss.

So he turned back to Bella and said, “I’ll go and find Nicola and we’ll go and get you some stuff.”

Bella smiled. “Thanks, Malcolm.” He went to turn away, but Bella’s hand caught his, and pulled him down towards her. She took him into a slightly awkward hug, and kissed his cheek. “I’m glad you came.”

He held her head into the crook of his neck for only a moment. “Why wouldn’t I?” he asked her. She released him, and he left, following the signs back to the main entrance, where he would have to find Nicola.

Nicola. Fucking Nicola.

When he found her, she was walking out of the women’s toilets. In the half an hour they’d been apart, she had completely changed. Her face was ashen, and her eyes sparkled under the harsh lights. “Malcolm!” she exclaimed. “How’s Bella?”

“Yeah, she’s okay,” he said. “She’s asked me to go into the town and get her some clothes. Euan forgot to take them up with him, and the doctor said she could go home later today if her temperature and scan are good enough.”

“That’s good,” Nicola smiled encouragingly.

But Malcolm did not smile. Never had he seen Nicola look so horrifically bad. Even after a panic attack, or after being stabbed, there had not been this emaciated look about her. She seemed smaller than ever before. Even her hair was dull. This was the first time in so long, after weeks of sleeping on the sofa and keeping her at a distance, he had seen her fully awake and without make-up.

She was no less beautiful; the difference, though, between what he remembered her looking like and what she looked like now was stark. He had neglected her. If he hadn’t, he would have noticed this long before now. How could he have been such a fucking ignorant cunt? Or had this happened so gradually that he’d not noticed? The children didn’t seem to have noticed, either, and they _did_ pay attention to their mother. Ella would have said something to him if she had noticed it. He was sure of that.

Perhaps her tiredness emphasised it. Maybe she didn’t actually normally look this bad. But today, she did, and that was his main concern.

The problem was, Malcolm now doubted his own memory.

“Are you alright, Nic’la?” he asked her.

“Of course,” she smiled brightly. “I’m just tired from all the fucking driving. But you’ll be under the limit now, so you can drive us into the city centre.” He nodded his head, not quite trusting her answer. He didn’t want to say he had heard Nicola’s conversation with Victoria. “You know,” Nicola said thoughtfully, “maybe we should set a date for this wedding of ours.”

Malcolm’s head whipped around, staring down at her as they walked back down that sloping corridor and out towards the car. “Why? What’s the rush?” he asked.

“Just all this,” Nicola replied absently. “Bella nearly dying. She’s only thirty-two. Life can be very short.”

He didn’t like that statement. He didn’t like it one fucking bit. So he simply avoided it. “We’ll take the road out by the airport into the town,” he said, unlocking the car door. “Fuck taking Hawkhill and Blackness Road in this weather, and on Christmas Eve.”

The drive was silent, apart from the occasional bout of road rage when idiots cut across him or overtook into oncoming traffic. When he glanced at Nicola as he drove onto Reform Street, a stone’s throw from the car park, she had her mouth firmly closed, staring out the windscreen, sweat running down her forehead.

“Nic’la?” he asked cautiously, taking the ticket from the machine and driving into the car park. She didn’t answer. “Nicola, darlin’, you okay?”

She nodded her head, but didn’t speak. As soon as he was parked, she jumped out of the car and hunched herself over the nearest bin, retching violently. He dived out and followed her; there was nothing he could do to stop her throwing up, so he held her hair away from her face and rubbed her back.

She stood up and took a deep breath; without a word, she went back to the car and opened up her pink backpack, taking out a packet of anti-bacterial wipes and a bottle of water. Malcolm could only watch as she wiped her hands and face and drank slowly from the bottle. Nicola seemed resigned to this. She wasn’t shocked or upset by it. She didn’t complain about it. Here was a woman who appeared to accept being violently sick without so much as a ripple in her composure.

She put the dirty wipe in the bin, threw the rucksack onto her shoulder and smiled, “What was it Bella wanted?”

Slightly dumbstruck by her reaction to the situation, he locked the car and started to walk to the internal entrance to the Overgate – Dundee’s busy shopping centre – and answered, “I don’t know. Fucking jeans and a hoodie? And she’ll need shoes, I guess. Hers are bound to be fucking soaking.”

“Text Euan and ask for her sizes,” Nicola told him.

Not wanting to cause a row by telling her he wasn’t her fucking skivvy, he obeyed silently. Euan replied within two minutes: _14 bottom, 12 top, 34C, 4 shoes_.

“Euan says fourteen for jeans, twelve for a top, thirty-four C, and a four for shoes,” he told Nicola as they walked into New Look.

“Thanks,” Nicola said, linking her arm with his as she wandered towards the knitwear section. But Malcolm stopped walking. He could not do this. He could not watch Nicola be so ill and not say anything. What kind of a partner would that make him? Nicola turned on her heel, a few feet away from him, when she found her arm separated from Malcolm’s. “What’s wrong, love?”

“What’s wrong?!” he repeated, his voice hoarse. “ _You_ are asking _me_ what’s fucking wrong?!”

“Yes,” she said simply.

“I have just watched you fucking vomit into a bin,” he said, “and you’re acting like it never happened. You’re pure white, Nic’la!”

“I’m just tired,” she said. It sounded robotic. Learned, like a script, or the lines he sent her onto _Newsnight_ with when he could not avoid putting her on television.

“Oh, fuck off!” he snapped. “Just tired! I’ve seen you tired, Nicola, and it doesn’t fucking look like this! And what’s with fucking carrying the bag around with you?! And not drinking – you never lay off the drink at parties!”

“Don’t do this,” she warned him. Her tone was low, cautionary, but Malcolm didn’t have the rational thinking required to heed her. He had to do this, or he was never going to get an answer.

He rubbed a hand over his face and took a single step towards her. “You’re fucking lying,” he stated harshly. “You are fucking lying, and whenever you fucking lie to me, everything has a habit of going to shit!”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I fucking _do_ want to know!” Malcolm said loudly. People looked at him with frowns, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care that this was neither the time or the place. It had to be done, and he couldn’t continue like nothing was going on. “You want to set a date for our wedding, but you won’t tell me the fucking truth, Nicola! What fucking kind of husband and wife are we going to be if you marry me still keeping fucking secrets?!”

Nicola tore the bag from her shoulder and roughly unzipped it. She pulled out the make-up bag. “You want to know what’s going on?! Really?! Okay, then. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!” she shouted. She’d lost control completely; the look in her eyes was wild, slightly unhinged, as she threw a small box at him. “Antidepressants!”

He caught the box. Mirtazapine.

She launched another box at him.

“Anti-sickness tablets!”

Another one flew through the air at him.

“Painkillers!” She just kept throwing boxes of pills at him. It was endless. “Another painkiller! Sleeping pills! Iron supplements! Vitamins! Skin cream! Fucking chemotherapy capsules!” she yelled, her whole body visibly shaking.

Malcolm felt like his heart had stopped. Nicola, exhausted, was leaning on one of the clothes rails. She looked like she might collapse, and yet Malcolm couldn’t make his feet move to go and help her. She was there, right in front of him; she suddenly looked so fragile, like she might break if she were to take the slightest fall. And that, he knew, was part of the reason she had not told him. He would have treated her differently. To pretend he wouldn’t have was to lie to himself.

When she eventually spoke, her tone was angry, and she was breathless. “Fucking say something, then. You’ve always got fucking something to say.”

He opened his mouth when ordered to speak, but nothing came out. Malcolm didn’t have the first fucking clue what to say. All he knew was that he didn’t know what to do.


	12. Fifty-Fifty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to chapter 12, and my third consecutive day without heating or hot water! Damn landlord has us on a bio mass system. It would be fucking brilliant if he knew how to operate the bastarding thing without leaving us in the cold on a regular basis. Right now, the greatest attraction of this move into a flat next week is a reliable heating system.
> 
> Thank you for all the feedback, too!

Malcolm’s head spun. The loud music in the shop did nothing to settle him while he raced through every scenario from Nicola’s full recovery to him becoming a widow. It all made sense now. Even the epic fuck up she had made in that interview – he should have seen what that really was, because even Nicola didn’t usually get quite _so_ confused as to come across as a racist, the one thing she could never be accused of being. Her need to sort everything out between him and Bella, too; was that because she needed him to be at peace with _all_ his family? Did she expect to survive?

And she had brought up setting a date for their wedding…fucking hell.

A man was helping Nicola upright, asking if she was okay. A girl of about fifteen picked up the boxes of medication on the floor that Malcolm had dropped, and placed them back inside their original bags. A boy, around eighteen or nineteen years of age, was speaking to him, but Malcolm barely registered it.

“Oi, pal,” the kid said, waving a hand in front of his face. “Are yeh awright?”

Alright? How could Malcolm possibly be alright? How could anything be alright when he was about to lose his fiancée and effectively become a single father to three children who weren’t even his?

“Yer wife, mate, she’s no right, like. Mibbeh tak ‘er doon tae Ninewells or suh’hin’?”

“I’ll be fine,” Nicola said breathlessly. “It’s just because I drove all night and then had to take those godforsaken bloody chemo pills,” she said. “The doctor said I’d be fucking knackered.”

Malcolm finally looked Nicola straight in the face. Anger rose through him like acid, bubbling away as he remembered that Nicola had been lying through her teeth every time she told him she was okay. He wanted to shake her, to tell her she really was utterly fucking retarded if she thought lying about this was the fucking way to go. She had gone through this on her own, without him to help her, and fucking went out of her way to hide it. Was he really so fucking unreliable that Nicola felt going through a cancer diagnosis without her fiancé’s support was better than telling him the truth?

The only thing that outweighed his fury at her was his fear of losing her. He had never before been able to be so livid with anyone, but still managed to love them so much.

Her eyes, tired but full of everything she wasn’t telling him, met his. His feet became unstuck and he crossed the distance between them in three long strides. He put his arms around her and held her tight; he closed his eyes and committed everything to memory. The smell of her, even after her driving overnight and being sick, was everything it always had been. He inhaled the scent of her shampoo as he buried his face into her hair.

But she felt tiny in his arms, and he realised now she had lost weight. Not enough to see it happen, seeing her every day, but enough to feel his arms reach further around her shoulders than he remembered, and to feel her cheekbones harder against his shoulder. She wasn’t as soft as he recalled her always being. But, she was still his Nicola, no matter what size she was.

“I love you, you fucking goggle-eyed fruit bat,” Malcolm whispered into her ear. She laughed and sobbed at the same time, and her arms wrapped around his torso. He didn’t even know what to do, so he did the only thing he knew he _could_ do. He made sure she knew that, despite her lies and his resentment, he loved her. He stroked her hair; it had always been frizzy and thick, but he felt it thinner between his fingers.

Malcolm wanted never to let her go. He wanted to stand here and hold her for until the end of time, where she was safe, where no harm could come to her. He didn’t care that they were in the middle of a clothes shop in Dundee, that everyone could see them, that they were nearly four hundred miles from their home and their children…he knew this moment was where Nicola could not die on him. To freeze time was his greatest desire, for even cancer could not kill if it didn’t get time.

But at the same time, he wanted to take her home. What if he never got another Christmas with her? What if the children never got another Christmas with her?

No. No, he mustn’t do that. He could not jump to conclusions. Down that road lay fucking insanity. He didn’t even know exactly what was wrong with Nicola yet.

He picked up her backpack and led her out of the shop, down the length of the shopping centre until they reached the Costa Coffee at the top end. He got them coffee and sat down with her, but she was avoiding his gaze. “Nicola, look at me,” he said quietly. But she didn’t. She stared into her coffee cup like it was the only compelling thing on the planet. He reached out and took her hand, and, finally, she looked up at him. “Cancer?” he asked her.

She nodded and looked back down.

“Care to elaborate?”

“I felt like shit,” she said. “I’ve felt like shit for months, but I thought it was just depression. Part of it _was_ fucking depression,” she muttered. “But it wasn’t just that. I was bloated, and fucking knackered, and sore, and…” she hesitated.

“And what?” he asked.

“No, you don’t want to know about that.”

“I fucking do want to know,” he retorted. “I don’t care what it was, Nicola, I need to know.”

She looked up and held his gaze for just a moment before looking back down. “And I was bleeding. And I thought, you know, I’m in my forties and I’ve never had regular…but this was too much. It got to the stage I knew it couldn’t possibly be normal.” Malcolm rubbed the back of Nicola’s hand with his thumb. “I went to the doctor. Last month. St. Andrew’s Day, actually,” she added. “Oh, Malcolm, I left it so late. If I’d not ignored it, it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as this now. I’m just very lucky I didn’t leave it any fucking longer. And the doctor did diagnose me with depression, but he referred me for tests. A week later, I was diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer. So they put me on chemo tablets to shrink it, and then they’ll try and remove it.”

“What are your chances?” Malcolm asked, his eyes closed; he dreaded the answer.

“They said about half and half,” Nicola said. “I’ll probably survive a year, and I’ve got about a forty to fifty percent chance of living more than five years.”

Malcolm opened his eyes. Five years. She wasn’t even forty-five yet; how could it be that she might not see her fiftieth birthday? The same birthday Malcolm himself celebrated last month. There was a half and half chance he would never be able to celebrate Nicola turning fifty years of age. She might not live to see the next general election, or see James out of jail. She might never live to see Ella turn eighteen, or Sophie take her GSCEs, or Ben become a teenager.

Nicola lifted her head and looked him in the eyes. “But I’m still young, Malcolm,” she reminded him earnestly. “That plays in my favour, okay? I will beat this. I _refuse_ to die of cancer.”

“It doesn’t quite fucking work like that,” Malcolm said. “You can’t just say ‘no’ to cancer, Nic’la.”

“Want a fucking bet?” she smiled. “If I can say ‘no’ to Malcolm Tucker, I can tell cancer to run and fuck itself.”

Why was she smiling? What did she have to fucking smile about?

But, Malcolm remembered, this was Nicola Murray. She needed him to be okay more than she needed herself to be okay; that was why she smiled. That was why she jumped between him and Bella, why she still forced herself to have the energy for her children and her work and her fiancé. And that was why, despite having cancer and having to take chemo tablets, she had driven Malcolm from London well over the Scottish border so he could see his daughter when he needed to. He hadn’t even asked her to. She had _wanted_ to do that for him, regardless of how unwell she was herself.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Nic’la?” he sighed.

“You were…I knew you were trying to deal with something,” she explained. “I didn’t know what, but I knew something was fucking ripping you apart. I couldn’t bring myself to add to that. I didn’t know how you would react, or if you would stay. And I didn’t want you to see me any differently. I didn’t want you to-” she faltered. Tears started to pour down her pallid face. “I didn’t want you to stop loving me.”

Malcolm’s instinct, as it so often was with Nicola Murray, was to shake her and tell her to stop being so fucking ludicrous. But he couldn’t do that, and not least because it wouldn’t work. Nicola’s sense of self-worth was so damaged that the slightest malfunction wrecked her ability to believe she was lovable. She didn’t believe in herself, but she needed him to believe in her. She didn’t love herself, but she needed him to love her.

The paradox was that, though she didn’t see it herself, Nicola could survive without love and without affirmation. Malcolm had no doubt that, even if she were a single mother, completely on her own, she would manage this. He knew that, if not for his presence and his probing, she could have fought this disease alone, as she had fought so many things alone. Nicola was not weak. Beneath her flailing anxiety and her cackhandedness, she was made of steel. He had found that out the hard way last year; he really did believe that the transition of having someone there opening up the wounds she wanted to close without treatment had, however temporarily, contributed to her breakdown. In Malcolm’s eyes, he had done short-term harm to prevent an irreversible act of self-harm on Nicola’s part.

His mother always told him that no relationship was always fifty-fifty. There were times one person wasn’t able for bringing their full fifty percent, and she had always told him that those were the times he had to bring it all to the table, even if it was more than he felt able to bring. He had never taken his mother’s lectures very seriously – they tended to be rooted in idealism and fairytale-style happiness – but today, he knew exactly what she had meant. Nicola couldn’t give him her fifty percent, and he needed to make up the shortfall, as she so often did for him.

“You think cancer would make any difference at all to how much I love you?” he asked her quietly.

“I don’t know what I thought,” Nicola cried. Malcolm got out of his chair and went to her, holding her head to his hip as she wept. “Sorry,” she sniffled.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” he growled. He pulled an empty chair from behind him and sat next to her, their fingers intertwined. “I’m not fucking going anywhere,” he promised her.

“The kids, Malcolm, if anything happens to me-”

“C’mon, Nic’la, do you really fucking think I’d leave them-”

“But they’re not your responsibility,” she cut through him. “You don’t owe them anything.”

“The other day, when we went to Covent Garden,” Malcolm began, “Ella got fucking lost in the swarm getting off the Tube. She panicked. She was shouting for me, and do you know what that girl ended up shouting across fucking Covent Garden station?” he asked, pushing Nicola’s hair out of her eyes. “She called me ‘Dad.’ So, no, Nicola, I will never abandon those three kids.”

“She called you ‘Dad,’ did she?” Nicola smiled gently. “She didn’t tell me that.”

Malcolm sighed. “She was fucking embarrassed.” He turned Nicola’s engagement ring around her finger. “Listen, if anything happens to you, I will look after them. They’re practically my kids now, anyway, since none of them want anything to do with James. And they’ll have Bella and Euan, as well, and your mum. What did you think we would do, let them fucking starve?!”

Nicola, a soft and sad smile upon her face, leaned over and put her head on Malcolm’s arm. “What did I do to deserve you?”

“Probably committed one of the fucking seven deadly sins,” he smirked. He pressed a kiss into her hair, and added, “We’d better go and start shopping before every arsehole Dundee and fucking Angus descends.”

He helped her to her feet and, together, they slowly wandered through the Overgate. Nicola being Nicola, she kept getting distracted by things in shop windows; some things, Malcolm was thankful to discover, never would change. He had never hoped Nicola would never change. There were times he’d have given the Earth to change her absentmindedness and her ineptitude, but they were as much a part of her as her soft heart and steel spine. And now, with the threat of her death hanging over his head, he never wanted to lose even the smallest part of Nicola, no matter how much stress it caused Malcolm on a daily basis.

By the time they found Bella some clothes, it was nearly twelve o’clock. Nicola had taken him in and out of just about every shop in the Overgate and, upon going outside into the snow- and ice-covered streets, they had found themselves on Murraygate, where Nicola insisted they have a look. She was losing energy quickly in the frozen air, but there was no telling her she had to go back indoors. Perhaps she needed this with him; maybe she was trying to prove she was still Nicola. Or maybe she was just fucking stubborn. Malcolm didn’t really know.

The blizzard, however, was starting up again. The snow blew across the street, but not in the same way it did in London. The wind was sharp, cutting the face off him, snow swirling violently around him. “I’ve never seen snow like this,” Nicola said, staring skyward at the flakes of frozen water being catapulted to Earth. “It’s so…” she tried to find her words, turning on the spot so she could look at the snow hurtling down Murraygate.

“Fucking cold?” Malcolm suggested, fastening the top button on Nicola’s coat and pulling her scarf over her chin.

“No,” she said. “No, it’s beautiful. It’s rough, and harsh, and fucking hostile,” she acknowledged. She stopped and put her eyes on Malcolm. “But it’s beautiful.”

“You’re fucking mad,” he accused.

Nicola grinned and pulled him down by the lapel of his coat; she pressed her lips against his, kissing him passionately, seemingly forgetting that they were in the middle of a busy city street. Between kisses, she uttered the words he could never take for granted again – he was all too aware that there could come a time he may never hear her say them again.

“I love you, Malcolm.”


	13. Christmas Eve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So after Tuesday I will be embarking upon at least a week where I will have no internet access unless I come out to my mother's house. Updates may become patchy.

It was at three o’clock Malcolm found himself at Bella’s bedside, Nicola falling asleep on his chest, listening to Euan tell the stories of his many near-arrest situations – Malcolm made a point of remembering never to let Euan go out to the press with Bella, under any fucking circumstances. “So, this witless bastard,” laughed Euan, “poors the petrol oan the fire and up the fuck it goes. But he’s an alky, and I’m fucking sure the vapours made his beard catch fire. He dives ow’er my fence, in the middle o’ fucking Arbroath, dancin’ aboot, screamin’ aboot his beard oan fire, so I dae the only thing tae be done: beat the fire oot. Next thing I ken, I’m gettin’ lifted by the hornies for assault ‘cause wan ae the neighbours thought I was beatin’ the shite intae the cowie.”

Malcolm couldn’t help but laugh. Euan had a knack for storytelling. Even his stories of his own dubious morality cracked Malcolm up, purely because Euan had the delivery down to a fine art.

“She alright?” Kathleen Townsley asked, and nodded down at Nicola. She was passed out across Malcolm’s chest, cuddled into him for the warmth she had lost fucking staring at the snow earlier. He pushed her hair back and subtly pressed his fingers to her neck for a few seconds; there was part of him becoming increasingly paranoid that Nicola might die the moment his back was turned.

“She’ll be…” Malcolm began, but he hesitated. It didn’t seem right to say Nicola would be fine. Bella squinted at him slightly, like she was trying to read his words as they left his mouth. “She’s tired,” he finally said, settling for something that at least was not a straight up lie.

Bella stared at him, but Malcolm didn’t buckle.

“Oh, they’ve closed the A90 out to Perth,” Aoife piped up, looking up from her phone. “Really brutal accident, by the look of it. Two lorries, four cars, at Invergowrie. All lanes closed. Says everyone’s diverted to the A923 and A94.”

“Up by Coupar Angus and back down to Perth,” Kathleen clarified. “Thon’s a bastard of a road,” she added. “Especially in the snow.”

“We’ll be grand, Kath,” Bella smiled. “Not like Skye’s any fucking better, is it? Single track roads and potholes the size of bloody Neptune up there.”

Nicola coughed; it sounded like her chest might rip open. Malcolm patted her back gently until it died down, but she did not wake. Everyone was eyeing Nicola with concern – even Kathleen, who’d known the woman all of two fucking hours. It seemed this journey had caused a real downturn in Nicola’s health; she was exhausted, pale, and had thrown up another twice, and now there was a chest on her.

“She’s no’ well,” Euan observed.

“She was okay the other night, though,” Bella reasoned. “Maybe it’s just the cold.”

Malcolm thought better of telling Bella that the drive up here to her bedside had, in part, caused Nicola’s ill health. It wouldn’t do any good, and it wasn’t like anyone had held a gun to Nicola’s head and told her to get herself over the border. She’d done this of her own volition, knowing full well she was seriously ill.

She felt breakable in his arms, like the slightest wrong move might break a bone. He had never been so aware of her physical fragility; he had always known of her mental vulnerability, even before he’d had very much to do with her. From the first day he met her, when he stood in that lift and told her she was a fucking mental omnishambles, he had known Nicola’s mind was hardwired to make her life, and his, difficult. But physically, she had always been robust. She had survived James’ beatings and stabbing with an astonishing resilience. She had brought four children into this world. She ran around the house like a blue arsed fly most of the time, trying to be SuperMum.

But now, there could be no more of that. The home had to become more his responsibility than hers, if he was to have any hope of another five or more years with her. He wondered briefly if HR or the PM or, God forbid, Julius fucking Nicholson knew of Nicola’s potentially fatal illness. Though they could not _force_ her to resign for the crime of having cancer, and they surely knew better than to ask Malcolm to force his own fiancée out of her job for something she could do nothing about, he knew they wouldn’t be very comfortable.

With time, Malcolm found the more he cared about Nicola – the more he loved her – the less he cared about what that half-witted bastard of a Prime Minister thought; really, the man should never be let out in public, never mind hold public office. And indeed, sometimes Malcolm and Jamie found themselves exhausting every other possible avenue before putting Tom out before the public.

The thought reminded him to call Jamie and ask what was happening with the coverage of Bella’s hospitalisation; he’d not paid enough attention while up here to know if the press had reported it as an act of drunken recklessness, or a simple case of being stranded after the last bus and underestimating the weather conditions.

By five that afternoon, Bella was up, dressed, and leaving Ninewells Hospital, discharge papers signed and ticking off from the consultant well and truly received. Though Bella admitted to feeling achy and having mild tremors, the doctors decided she was fit to go home, as long as she took a reasonable amount of rest. And by the time they were all heading to the exit, Bella was looking in a far better state than Nicola, who claimed to have a clean bill of physical health, though she never could claim she wasn’t mentally a bit screwy.

Malcolm was painfully aware that beneath Nicola’s laughter and her determination that nothing should change, she was struggling. She was allowing her weight to be supported by him, though in such a way that it looked like they simply walked arm in arm, as couples do.

Once in the car, and heading north rather than south, Malcolm asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Like shit,” Nicola mumbled. “Fucking tablets. Two more days, then I can stop them for a couple of weeks. Fucking naproxen doesn’t help, either. Just makes me feel sick.”

The contrast was nothing short of horrifying. Just last night, despite being on the same medication, Nicola had been able-bodied and perfectly happy to fuck him on the cloakroom floor, had Jamie not walked in on them. Now, after one all-nighter, she sat in the passenger seat looking like all the blood had been drained from her face. “Are you sure you don’t want to get checked over? We’ve not left Dundee yet and-”

“No, Malcolm,” she said firmly, more strength in her voice now. “This is just what happens when you overexert yourself while on chemo. I’ll be okay.”

“And if you’re fucking not?!”

“We can cross that bridge if we come to it.”

There it was. The very same strength that bordered between heroism and self-harm. When would she understand that courage and stubbornness weren’t always one and the same? “We have to tell the kids fucking something, Nic’la. They’re gonna see the-”

“I’m not telling them-”

“And what happens when you do eventually go for this fucking surgery?!” Malcolm shot at her furiously. “What am I meant to tell them? And if you fucking die, what am I meant to tell them?!”

“Oh, fucking don’t, Malcolm,” Nicola sighed.

Malcolm rolled his eyes. Trust Nicola to shy away from the subject of her own fucking mortality. She wasn’t the fucking one who had to deal with the consequences if ever she did die, and Malcolm was in far too deep to be able to simply walk away and leave it all to Victoria. “Well, we’ll fucking have to at some point, Nic’la, because you can’t fucking guarantee this thing won’t kill you.”

“Malcolm,” she groaned. “I’ve had anxiety and claustrophobia as long as I can remember. My daughter is dead. I’ve ended up with fucking depression. My husband tried to murder me. Cancer is _not_ going to be what kills me.”

“You say it like it’s a fucking choice!” exploded Malcolm as he pulled off the roundabout towards Camperdown and Coupar Angus. Keeping his cool with this notion that Nicola had the ability to ultimately decided whether or not she would die from ovarian cancer was becoming near impossible. It was that same naivety that possessed her to utter in public the idea that people could be inspired out of chronic poverty; Malcolm knew Nicola’s way of thinking all too well. “Fucking cancer, Nicola! You can’t possibly think mental illness and your fucking deranged psycho of an ex-husband can be equated to fucking _cancer_! It’s a fucking different game entirely! You fucking stupid, naïve woman!”

He glanced around at Nicola, who stared at him with an expression of shock upon her face. She burst into tears. Malcolm was far too frustrated with her to be able to make any effort to calm her down. “You’re being-”

“Aye, well, you’re not marrying a fucking saint,” snapped Malcolm. “Now you know.”

“I always knew you weren’t a saint.”

“Then you shouldn’t be fucking surprised that-”

“But I also thought, despite your fucking cruel power games and volatile outbursts, you were a fucking good man.”

Malcolm’s mouth was clenched shut, willing himself not to snap back at her. She might be infuriating, but she was very ill. He needed to remember to be gentler with her.

He stared into the road ahead, focussing on driving without wrapping the car around a tree. There was nothing he could do but drive Nicola to where she needed to be; beyond that, he was powerless. If there was one thing Malcolm hated, it was feeling helpless. It was worse than anything he’d ever encountered, even the knowledge that he’d let his father die, or that he had a child everyone had conspired to hide from him. This was the idea that he might lose the woman – that naïve, daft, dozy, inept, claustrophobic, anxious, depressed mess who gave her everything to her children and to Malcolm – he had come to love, before he really got to spend his life with her. It was the realisation he was not ten feet tall, that he didn’t know it all, and that there was so much he couldn’t bear to think about.

For the next eight hours, until Malcolm pulled into their driveway with the car, they didn’t speak. He had let Nicola fall asleep in her stony silence. He got out of the car and opened the passenger side door, gently shaking Nicola awake. “We’re home,” he told her. Without mention of their row, he helped her out of the car and steadied her on her feet. The sleep had done her good; she seemed much stronger for it.

When they got into the house, Victoria was still awake, watching some film on the television with a glass of wine in her hand. “Oh, hello,” she smiled, looking up from the screen. “How was Scotland? How’s Bella?”

“Bella’s fine,” Malcolm said. “They let her home.”

“Oh, good,” Victoria said. She stood up and added, “The kids are asleep. All their presents are hidden in the cupboard under the stairs, but I can set them out if-”

“No,” Nicola said firmly. “I want to do it.”

Victoria held her daughter’s gaze for a moment, but nodded with an understanding smile. Malcolm understood now, too, though he almost wished he didn’t. Nicola was scared she would never get to set out her children’s Christmas presents again, that she might not be here next Christmas. “Malcolm, help me, please,” she said, going out into the hallway.

“I thought you wanted-”

Nicola stopped dead, and he almost walked straight into her. “I need you to know exactly how we do this, Malcolm.”

The façade was broken. The pretence that she believed she was in control of her illness shattered there and then. But she didn’t break. She didn’t cry. She simply unlocked the cupboard and started to pull out the presents and the wrapping paper, making as little noise as possible when she passed them out to Malcolm, who passed some down to Victoria. Once everything was in the living room, Nicola stood up and said, “Ella’s go there,” she pointed to the sofa nearest the window. “Sophie’s there,” she gestured to the sofa against the wall adjoining to the kitchen, “and Ben’s go there,” she touched the armchair beside her. “Katie’s used to go on the coffee table,” she added; he heard the pain in her voice as she said it. Christmas wasn’t completely a source of fun and joy for Nicola anymore. It was also the reminder that one of her daughters was no longer there to celebrate with the family.

Malcolm looked around at Victoria; she gave him a sad but encouraging smile, nodding towards Nicola in what was the silent order to pay attention, as she headed out to the kitchen.

“Ella’s paper always has snowflakes. Sophie has penguins and Ben always has Santas,” she instructed, handing him a roll of paper with snowflakes as she sat down cross-legged on the floor. He joined her and pulled one of Ella’s presents towards him but, before he started, he put his hand on Nicola’s and stopped her from reaching for the scissors. She froze for a moment, and said, “I know, Malcolm. It’s okay.”

He leaned over and kissed her head, still frustrated and still fit to thump sense into her, but too in love to do anything about it. Victoria soon returned with two mugs – she had developed a rather unhealthy winter habit of plying everyone in the house with Nutella hot chocolate. She set them down on the floor, and set about separating the presents into piles for Malcolm and Nicola to wrap.

And for the first time, Malcolm discovered, he was sat here playing Santa Claus. The tragedy was that he could not say whether or not he’d have Mrs. Claus next Christmas Eve.


	14. Nothing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Moving day! Christ help me. So for the next couple of weeks I shall have to come out to my mother's place for internet access, which means squiffy updating.
> 
> Someone shoot me.

Numbness came to Malcolm in the early hours. The sensation of his stomach dropping to the floor woke him as the clock turned to 4:09am. After that, there was nothing. It was like his ability to feel – an ability he had only just begun to appreciate after a lifetime of cursing it – vanished into thin air, along with everything that made him the human being Nicola Murray managed to love.

Rather than lie there in the dark and listen to Nicola breathe, he got up and went down to the kitchen, knowing the two hours’ sleep he’d had was all he was going to get. Ben wasn’t going to remain asleep much longer, anyway, if typical seven-year-old behaviour at Christmas was anything to go by. But when he opened the kitchen door, he found Victoria sitting there with a cup of coffee and a bottle of whisky. “Victoria?” he asked sleepily, rubbing his face until he resembled something capable of basic functioning.

“Oh, Malcolm!” she exclaimed, surprised by his unannounced visit. “What are you doing up?”

“Back at ye,” he replied, filling the kettle.

“Couldn’t sleep,” admitted Victoria.

“Yeah,” Malcolm sighed. “Yeah, me too.”

He switched the kettle on, threw a teabag into a mug and turned around to face Victoria. She looked fucking exhausted. “She told you, then,” Victoria said. Her tone was almost conversational. Anyone would’ve thought she was talking about the fucking weather. But there was something lurking beneath it; even Malcolm could see that.

“That she might not see fifty?” he asked. “Yeah, she told me.” Victoria put her head in her hands, staring a hole into the breakfast table. “You okay?” It was, he realised after he asked it, a fucking stupid question. But it was one that could not be answered unless it was asked.

“I don’t want to outlive my child,” she murmured. She was uncharacteristically quiet; Malcolm was used to seeing Victoria take charge in the most ostentatious of ways, cursing and swearing and letting the entire world know she was the fucking boss and she was fucking untouchable. “I’ve seen what it’s done to Nicola, and I can’t fucking stand the idea of it.”

The kettle come to the boil, and Malcolm made his cup of tea as he considered his reply. There was, of course, no way he could comfort her with any sort of assurance that Nicola was going to be alright. That was a promise he could not keep and therefore would not make. And as for saying Victoria would be fine if ever Nicola died…that was something that might just earn him a slap. How could he comfort Victoria when there was nothing he could give her? There was nothing he could say to make this bearable for himself, never mind the woman who raised Nicola.

He sat down on a stool opposite Victoria, still lost for what he could say to her.

There was no amount of nauseating positive bullshit he could spew that could convince either of them that their world wasn’t disintegrating before their very eyes.

“I shouted at her, you know,” he confessed. He didn’t really know why he was telling Victoria this. Maybe he was just filling the silence with his own grievances. “In the car, on the road out to Coupar Angus.”

“Why?”

“Because she went on about refusing to die like she had the fucking choice,” he said. “It was doing my fucking head in.”

“She can be…” Victoria began, but seemingly, she could not find the words to describe her daughter’s level of fucking idealism.

“I know.”

The world was small at this hour of the day; it was that time in which nothing was expected of a person. And usually, Malcolm could be whoever he needed to be in this time of freedom. If he needed a moment of weakness, he took it, and if he needed to hate himself or the rest of the world, he did. But there was nothing left to do with the middle of the night anymore. This was no longer his time to reflect upon his feelings, or deal with the emotions he could not deal with in daylight hours. He didn’t _feel_ anything.

“Are _you_ okay?” Victoria asked.

“Me?” Malcolm asked, taken aback by the question. “Aye, I’m fine.”

That, of course, was a lie. Even Malcolm had the emotional awareness to know that people who could not feel were not fine. But realistically, there was very little he could do about that and, in the grand scheme of it all, his wellbeing had to come at the bottom of the list. Nicola, Ella, Ben, Sophie, Victoria, Bella…they all had to come first. He knew enough of family and life to know that.

But this numbness, if Malcolm had to measure it up to something recognisable, was almost a sort of pain. Or was it that he knew that, in this situation, he should not have been numb at all? He knew he ought to have been distraught, angry, frightened, in love, protective – everything a normal, functional human being would feel when handed the news their wife-to-be had advanced cancer and only had half a chance of surviving five years. And he had felt that. He had felt all that to the point that he lost his rag with Nicola in the car on the way home. But it was gone now. Everything that made him human was gone, up in smoke and nowhere to be found.

He did not feel. He thought. And all he thought was that he could not do this. He was not a man designed to be a single father or a widower. His forte was politics, not childcare, or end-of-life care, or child bereavement counselling. He couldn’t do any of that, could he? It was insanity to entertain the notion that he could.

They sat quietly for nearly an hour, only speaking to offer each other another drink as they refilled their own. Just after five o’clock, there were footsteps on the stairs, the sound of children hurtling down into Christmas Day. He got up into the hallway and saw them all run into the living room, gasping in wonder at the piles of presents and the stockings under the coloured glow of the fairy lights. Nicola followed slowly, tying her dressing gown around the waist.

She smiled up at him, genuine happiness shining in her eyes, but Malcolm struggled to force a smile in return. Smiling when he was miserable was easy; second nature, in fact. But smiling when there was nothing, when he was empty? That was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do; he did, however, do it, for the sake of Nicola and those three children who were so deliriously happy to be tearing into presents and littering the house with the shredded remains of wrapping paper.

He sat down on the sofa Ella’s presents had been set out on, watching her grin as she opened up the laptop she had been begging for, claiming she would need it for writing essays next school year; Malcolm knew, however, that she was more interested in everything else a computer had to offer. Essays certainly weren’t at the forefront of Ella’s mind as she squealed about how much she had wanted one.

She bent over and pulled a small present out from under the tree, and handed it to Malcolm. He looked up at her with a frown under which she did not falter, and tore away the paper to find a small box. Inside it was a chain bracelet with an ID panel, like the ones people with allergies or diabetes often wore.

“‘Not my father, but my dad,’” he murmured to himself.

Something sparked, the briefest moment of emotion, and he stood up and grabbed Ella, holding her tightly in his arms. He kissed her hair and whispered, “Thank you.” The wall of hesitation between them – her hesitation to let him in, and his hesitation to give her his heart – lay in bits on the floor around them. For the first time, Malcolm said, “I love you, Ella.”

And though he could not feel it right now, he remembered the love he felt for her – and for her siblings – and there was no doubt in his mind that he was telling her the truth.

He looked over at Nicola and Victoria; they both looked rather shocked, and so probably knew as much about this idea of Ella’s as he had: fuck all. But Nicola was grinning like every Christmas of hers had landed this morning. Malcolm knew that this, to her, was her child accepting her choice of partner, approving of her decision; there was probably a part of her that was reassured now that he could never walk out on these children, no matter how tough things got.

That was the only flash of emotion he felt all day. He put on the act expected of fathers. He carved the turkey Victoria took control of cooking. He played with the kids’ toys with them. He set up Ella’s new laptop for her, played Ben’s new video game with him, helped Sophie with the ins and outs of the intricate and delicate fairy world she had been given. He kissed Nicola, hugged Victoria, broke into the wine, read out the shit jokes in the crackers, settled the argument over which channel to have the television on. He fell asleep on the sofa with Sophie in his arms and Ben’s head on his knee.

He was everything he was supposed to be, except happy. He’d have settled for contentment or even the bittersweet feeling that came with doing something for the very last time. But there was only a void he could not work out how to fill.

By the time the kids were in bed and Victoria had headed home to relieve her neighbour of her dog, Malcolm could honestly say he had never been so fucking exhausted in his life. Physically, he had no excuse to be this tired; he had taken an hour-long nap with Ben and Sophie, for fuck’s sake. But that wasn’t what tired him out. It was carrying the weight of emptiness, all the while knowing it was all wrong.

He left Nicola in the living room and went up to bed, unable to bring himself to say anything to her on any of the many subjects he knew, at some stage, they would have no option but to discuss. He didn’t have the energy for that.

Malcolm lay in bed, his arms wrapped around his own abdomen, his knees drawn upwards, alone.

Though his eyes were closed and he was beyond exhausted, there was no hope of him sleeping. He could hear the television on downstairs; whatever Nicola was watching, it made her laugh loudly enough for him to hear it. He should have been down there with her. He knew that. Any half-decent fiancé would be clawing at whatever time he could get with Nicola, knowing she might not be with him as long as he had always assumed.

That was the thing, though. He wasn’t a decent fiancé. If he were, he wouldn’t have let Nicola slip through the cracks while he obsessed over other things. He would never have pushed her to confess to everything in the middle of Dundee, and he most definitely would not have exploded at her in the confines of a car. Whatever it was Nicola saw in him that made her love him, he would never understand.

When Nicola eventually turned the TV off and came to bed, Malcolm feigned sleep. He didn’t want another fight, or another lecture, or another reason to want to shake Nicola – though at this stage, he’d have welcomed anger, fear and frustration if it filled this fucking hole. He didn’t dare touch her, but he could sense she was mere inches from him. She always was when they lay in bed, but he was never so aware of it as he was now; it dawned on him that her side of the bed might one day be empty, never to be warm again. The void only widened at the thought. It was all-consuming.

“Are you awake, Malcolm?” whispered Nicola.

Malcolm hesitated but, after a moment, answered, “Yeah.”

He hadn’t noticed until now how his fingers had tightened around his t-shirt like claws, the cloth bunched up in his rigid fingers, or how he had curled himself into a ball like a frightened child.

“Did you have a good Christmas?” Nicola asked into the darkness.

“Yeah.”

He felt a kiss pressed into his neck, and arms that enveloped him like a baby’s swaddle. It didn’t make him feel safe, or loved; in fact, it made no difference at all. Nothing was as it was meant to be. _He_ was not what he was supposed to be.

Nicola’s face was resting against his shoulder, like it so often did when they slept. She had this need for intimacy Malcolm had never completely understood; perhaps it was because she had been starved of contact under James’ reign of neglect, but that was only Malcolm’s best guess.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”


	15. Boxing Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hellooooo!
> 
> Currently borrowing my mother's Wi-Fi. Move went okay, though I did splatter lentil and vegetable soup when the lid came off the blender last night. Rapidly finding I hate Scottish Water but SSE are fab with me. Grown up problems.

Boxing Day came straight from Malcolm’s nightmares.

It was the last day of Nicola’s chemo cycle; she was sick, and she looked like death warmed up, but still she insisted that they accept Bella’s invitation to her home. This meant Malcolm had to pretend he was not an empty shell, and that he had to be in the same building as Bernadette, who he still had not got around to forgiving. It might be the grown-up thing to do, but Malcolm Tucker didn’t feel like a grown-up right now.

Despite his protests, at five that afternoon, they were sitting in Bella’s kitchen while the children played in the living room. Nicola sat at Malcolm’s side, saying very little in far too many words, as the average Cabinet minister had a tendency to do. She discussed the children with Bella and, though it seemed to irritate Bella, Bernadette. Euan and Aoife tried to coax some life out of Malcolm, but he could not give them what he did not have.

Gordon Kelly – Bernadette’s husband – made dinner around them, though Malcolm could not work out what it was he was cooking. Something in a very large pot, at any rate.

The conversation between Nicola and Bella turned to Bella’s ethnicity; truth be told, this was something Malcolm hadn’t known how to address. There was so much of it even he did not understand. “…and all the families have nicknames,” Bella explained with a grin. “None of them good, either.”

“Mind whit they used to call auld John Donaldson?” snorted Bernadette.

“Never tae he’s face,” Euan added. “Naeb’dy’s _that_ desperate fur a beatin’.”

“John Donaldson and his brothers,” Bernadette began, “back in the eighties, used tae go mad for golden syrup on pieces. Spoon it on the breid and slap it th’gither. So we called them the Tate and Lyle Brothers.”

Nicola laughed. Really laughed. Anyone would have thought it was the most hilarious thing she’d ever heard.

“Better than bein’ a Slaivers,” smirked Euan.

“Aye, aye, Six Toes,” Bella retorted into her mug of tea. “ _Don’t_ say any of these things to other Travellers,” Bella added solemnly. “Euan’s right – it’ll probably get ye a beatin’.”

“Wi’ a green stick,” Euan clarified, like that meant anything to anyone but him.

“Y’know, I’m sure auld John’s pal said it tae him once,” Bernadette. “McDonald, the auld yin that threw the pushbike ow’er the Dunkeld bridge. Aye, back when they wur daein’ the berries in Blair. Shouted across the dreel, ‘Oi! Tate and Lyle Brothers! Come an’ haul thon crate o’ yers afore I brack it ow’er yer heids!’ Jesus, Mary and Joseph, did hawf the Travellers in Perthshire no’ riot there an’ then!”

Everyone laughed; Malcolm forced a grin, knowing that was supposed to be funny – and it was, to everyone who had the capacity to be amused and entertained.

He didn’t want this banal numbness. He wanted extremes. He wanted to be deliriously happy, or desperately sad, or dangerously angry. At least then he would be feeling something worth feeling. Malcolm had always, on some level, grateful that his head had control of his heart. In his darkest days in Downing Street, when it all went to shit and the government made decisions that did wrong by the entire country, he had been, despite his cold manipulation and unempathetic behaviour, furious and indignant enough to actually flirt with the idea of revolting. But his head, ever the strategist, told his heart to sit down and shut the fuck up. And when Nicola had infuriated him, he had raged at her until his head reminded him that she wasn’t nearly capable of taking his rage and using it to fix things herself. But that flicker of rage was his whole humanity in a moment, and there was nothing he wouldn’t have given to feel it again.

Alasdair, Bella’s three-year-old son, came running into the kitchen. “Ma, Eilidh’s chored the sweeties!”

Eilidh wasn’t far behind him. “You wee rat!”

“Don’t name!” Bella, Euan and Bernadette bellowed in unison. Malcolm, who had been in a reverie trying to find something to feel, jumped involuntarily at the sudden shout.

Bella added, “If yer gonnae name, ye’ll no dae it under my roof, Eilidh Whyte!”

Eilidh looked at the floor. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

“Put the sweeties back in the cupboard,” Bella ordered, her tone less severe now, “and do _not_ touch them again unless I say so.”

The pair of them scampered back out of the room. “Name?” Nicola asked, completely bewildered.

“Animals,” Bella said. “Well, some of them. It’s bad luck.” She said it like it was as sure as science, like it was based on infallible logic.

“You’re too lenient on that lassie,” Bernadette accused.

Bella’s jaw set into a hard line. “When I want your opinion, I will ask for it,” she replied coldly. “And anyway, you’re hardly in a position to be throwing stones in the parenting department.”

In that moment, Malcolm noticed something amazing about his daughter. When she was angry, she spoke whichever language the perpetrator was least used to. In the office, with her junior ministers and her civil servants, she used an often-unintelligible mix of Scots, Gaelic and cant, because most would not know the entirety of what she said. But when Bernadette crossed the line, Bella answered her in cold, hard, perfect English; Bernadette, of course, could speak English perfectly well, but Malcolm knew it was not her first language. He knew she didn’t speak a word of proper English until she had to go to school.

Perhaps his daughter had the same talent for mind games he himself had mastered.

Malcolm’s phone rang. Jamie. He stepped outside the house into the slowly thawing snow to answer it. “Malcolm,” Jamie said frantically. “Listen, the Mail’s found out you and Nicola were in Dundee while Bella was in Ninewells. We’ve passed what happened to her off as shit luck. She missed the last bus to her auntie’s house because the train was late and she tried to walk it, but Malcolm-”

“Tell them fuck all,” Malcolm said tonelessly. “Or say I have relations in Dundee I was visiting. Just don’t tell them a fucking thing about Bella. That’s the last fucking thing I need.”

“They’re also saying you and Nicola had a fucking domestic in New Look,” Jamie informed him. Malcolm leaned against the frozen wall and closed his eyes. His mind turned at a million miles a minute trying to spin this. “And that Nicola is ill. I mean, they can’t use that, but-”

“Fucking right they can’t use it,” Malcolm replied. “I hope you fucking told them that.”

“What do you fucking take me for?” Jamie retorted. “Of course I fucking told them. But I need to know if it’s true, because it’ll come out at some stage if it fucking is true.”

Malcolm groaned. He didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to turn Nicola’s illness into a political minefield; but she was a politician, and so it always was going to be a political minefield. Really, he’d just been hoping for a few weeks to get his head around it before having to devise a media strategy.

“Malcolm?”

“Yes,” he sighed. “Yes, fucking Nicola is fucking ill.”

“How ill?”

“Extremely fucking ill,” Malcolm snapped.

“What are we talking here?” Jamie asked. “On a scale of a fucking sniffle to terminal fucking stupidity?”

“Stage three cancer.” Jamie fell silent, leaving only the crackling of the line as a response. “Stage fucking three ovarian fucking cancer.”

There it was. The fury Malcolm had all but longed for burned in his stomach like fucking hydrochloric acid. _His_ fiancée was dying. _His_ stepchildren could be left without a mother. _His_ life was falling apart around him. Suddenly, this wasn’t something that was happening to Nicola. This was happening to him. There was no objectifying it by saying it was Nicola’s life. It was his life, too, and the outcome of this would determine what he would do with the rest of his time on Earth.

“Can I tell them? Strictly off the record,” Jamie added hastily. “They won’t be able tae use any of it. It’ll just stop them fucking speculating like it’s an episode of Holby fucking City.”

“If you must.”

“Okay. Happy Christmas, by the way.”

“Yeah. Merry fucking Christmas,” Malcolm grumbled. He hung up the phone; he stalked inside and shot at Nicola, “A word. In fucking private.”

“Malcolm?” she asked, panic-stricken. He led her to the dining room without a word and shut the door behind them.

“The Mail knows.”

“What?!” she hissed.

“Jamie’s telling them off the record so they can’t fucking use it,” Malcolm explained, “but they know about our fucking bust up in Dundee on Christmas Eve. Jamie’s telling them the truth off the record so they can’t print or pass on any of it.”

Nicola sat down on a chair and put her face in her hands; he heard her quietly sob, and it raised that same acidic anger in him. “Oh, yeah,” he snapped, “very fucking helpful, Nic’la.” She only cried harder. “Why is it I spend half my fucking time convincing the fucking press you’re not the biggest fucking disaster on two fucking legs?! You’re fucking useless! A fucking retarded sloth would be fucking easier to deal with than you!”

She looked up at him, mascara starting to run from her lashes. “Then fucking don’t deal with me!”

“Oh, if only I had that choice, darlin’!” he retorted. “But if I fucking resign the next one that comes along to try and make you look like a fucking normal, functioning person would shoot himself in the first week!” Malcolm was both startled and horrified to find that he would have loved nothing more than to fucking thump Nicola right now. Not to make her see sense, or to get her over this outburst of emotion, but to relieve his own rage. “You,” he pointed at her, “are enough to drive anyone to the fucking brink!”

But as he pointed at her, his hand shook. Rather than wait to say or do something he might regret, he threw the door open and walked out into the kitchen. Bernadette, Gordon, Euan, Bella and Aoife all stared at him, but he didn’t have it in him to care. He was too infuriated by Nicola’s pathetic reactions to give a flying fuck what they thought; Bella and Bernadette had both seen him lose his temper on more than one occasion, anyway, and so knew this was what happened.

Malcolm stormed out of the house, ignoring the footsteps that followed. He didn’t want to listen to Nicola. He didn’t even want to see her.

“Malcolm?” Bella’s voice behind him asked. “Malcolm, what the fuck’s going on?”

He closed his eyes and tried to batter down the need to break something. “Nothing,” he replied. “Fucking nothing.”

“Don’t fucking lie.”

Another pair of feet ran down the hall. “Malcolm,” Aoife said. “Malcolm, Nicola’s just been sick!”

“She’ll be fine.”

“But-”

Malcolm turned around and glared at the young Irishwoman. “She’s been sick twice already today, Aoife. She’ll be fine once she gets a fucking grip on herself and calms the fuck down.”

Aoife and Bella exchanged a look; Aoife went back into the house, but Bella remained with Malcolm. He wished she would just fuck off and leave him to it. Everything about this world, this life, enraged him. The fact a woman who had lost a child and survived abuse and an attempt on her life was now saddled with potentially lethal cancer…how the fuck was that fair? How could he ever see a world that did that as reasonable?

And he was unforgivable. His partner was fighting cancer and he had just ripped her to fucking shreds where everyone could hear him. He might curse this world for being reasonable, but he was just as bad.

But Nicola would forgive him. She always did. That was what he found most difficult to stomach; no matter how badly he treated her at work, or at home, she forgave him. And in situations like these, her priority was not how he had made her feel, but why he had lashed out in the first place. Malcolm often thought it was the way a mother’s brain was hardwired, to look for the reason something was said, rather than obsess over what was said.

He couldn’t let her do that. Malcolm knew that he could never let Nicola know that he could not cope; he would just have to pretend he was coping, because those three kids needed him.

“Malcolm, you’re-”

“Fuck off, Bella,” he warned her. The fact this was his daughter speaking to him only made it harder to push her out, but he had to do it. “Just…just fuck off back inside to your mum and dad, and your husband and kids. Leave me fucking to it.”

Bella glared at him, pausing a moment before saying, “Gordon never was my dad. My dad was always somewhere out there, but Gordon Kelly isn’t anything close to my dad. He’s the man Mum married, and was responsible for me when I was a bairn, but he’s not my fucking dad, Malcolm.” She returned to her home and slammed the door in his face.

Malcolm pressed his forehead into the cold stone wall, and dug his knuckles into the bricks, dragging them downwards. He was sure his hands would be scraped all to fuck, but he needed to focus on that pain; it chained him to reality, and prevented him from doing anything someone else might live to regret. He had never felt that need for death that Nicola had occasionally experienced, until now. It was now he understood why she had once tried to hang herself. And if this was the torment his own father had endured, Malcolm could understand why he did what he did. He didn’t know what was worse. The numbness had been bad enough, but this hatred for the world, and himself, and the instinct to isolate himself was unbearable.

He heard the door open. “Malcolm?”

It was Euan Whyte.

“Malcolm,” he said, “Bella’s worried-”

“I’m fine,” Malcolm growled. “I’m fucking fine.”

“The high colour’s pishin’ oot yer hands,” Euan pointed out. “Yer no’ fine.”

Malcolm looked down to find that Euan was right; blood was dripping down his fingers from his knuckles, such was the force that he’d used to drag knuckles down the front of his daughter’s house. But the pain was the best thing Malcolm was able to feel. It wasn’t emptiness, anger or hatred. Anything had to be better than that, after all.

“Come in aboot,” Euan offered, his hand between Malcolm’s shoulder blades. “We’ll clean that up,” he pointed at Malcolm’s hand, “an’ get some scran, eh?”

Reluctantly, Malcolm allowed himself to be guided back into the house, where the air was warm and charged with questions he could not or would not answer. He sat down in the chair Aoife pulled out for him. Nobody spoke, apart from Nicola, who asked Bella for a first aid kit and told Bernadette to fill a bowl with Dettol and hot water.

She pulled on gloves and pulled out some cotton pads, soaking one in the Dettol and water mix and pressing it to Malcolm’s grazed knuckles. He winced as the Dettol stung his opened skin. “Sorry,” Nicola murmured.

The rest of them – Bernadette, Gordon, Bella, Euan and Aoife – went through to join the children in the living room, Gordon having taken his pot off the ring.

They were alone.

Malcolm’s rage dissipated, replaced with the same deadness that preceded it. He was detached from the pain in his hands; it was just something his nerves did when his skin was damaged. It didn’t even feel like physical pain as Malcolm had ever known it. There was nothing unpleasant about it, but there was also nothing pleasant about it, either. It was irrelevant. Insignificant. Lost in a sinkhole of utter shit.

“Are you okay?” Nicola asked him as she wrapped dressings around his knuckles.

“Yeah.”

She gave him a sad sort of smile. “There. All patched up.”

What was she doing? Why wasn’t she screaming at him, telling him he was the biggest cunt on the planet? There was no reason for Nicola to be tending to his wounds in a house with four other adults more than capable of doing so. Anyone sane, if they’d just been subjected to the sharp end of his fucking temper, would have asked someone else – _anyone_ else – to put the antiseptic on his wounds.

But Nicola Murray wasn’t sane, was she? Not even close.

That was the very reason she understood him. Neither of them were stable human beings. And Nicola seemed to know when he wasn’t in control. He often wondered why she didn’t hate him for it, considering she had been married to a man who seemed to have the very same problem with keeping his head. Malcolm sometimes said and did things he didn’t think James would ever have got away with. He pushed the very boundaries that had helped splinter Nicola’s marriage to James, and yet she seemed to love him anyway.

He had devoured her in that dining room, and yet here she sat, still looking at him like he was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Was she really so thankful he hadn’t walked out on her and her children that she was able to overlook his abuse?

For the first time, Malcolm saw in himself the same thing he loathed so much in James Murray: the willingness to destroy Nicola at her lowest point, for his own release. He wasn’t a nice person at the best of times – he knew and fully accepted that – but he had always managed to reserve the worst of himself for the situations that deserved it. And Nicola being upset because she had cancer and the Daily fucking Mail had found out was not a situation that deserved his most abusive response. She had not fucked up here. He had. He should have known better than to cause a scene in public, even if it was so far from Westminster that he could have been excused for forgetting they were in a position to be scrutinised.

He had been wrong to wish for an extreme; at least the numbness only destroyed him.

Though surrounded by family, Malcolm had never been so alone. The one person to whom his walls were windows was the one person who could never be allowed to know the extent of what went on in his head.

Sophie poked her head around the door. “Bella wants to know when you want to have dinner.”

“Whenever, sweetheart,” Nicola smiled. “We’re finished in here now.”

Sophie nodded; Malcolm always found Sophie odd, in that she drew in the atmosphere around her, feeling everything everyone else felt. It wasn’t always a good thing, but it was part of Sophie Murray. She came into the kitchen properly and sat on her mother’s lap, hugging Nicola tightly.

Malcolm, feeling suddenly like he was intruding upon a mother’s time with her child, stood up and left the room. He didn’t go into the living room; he didn’t want bombarded with questions and accusations. Instead, he sat down on the stairs. There was no telling how long Malcolm could bear this; he was capable of feeling angry and hateful or empty and lonely. There was nothing else for him, and he didn’t have the energy to seek out anything beyond what he already knew existed.

It was Euan who came to sit next to him, as Sophie came and beckoned everyone through for tea. “What is it, Malcolm?” asked Euan. “This isn’t like you.” For once, he spoke perfect English – something Euan didn’t usually bother with. “There’s something wrong. We all know it.”

The emptiness broke Malcolm. The knowledge he was not what he was meant to be ripped into him. And the thought that Nicola might die – that she had less than half a chance of long term survival – killed him. Every cell in his body screamed at him to talk, as Nicola always told him to; he had told Jamie the truth, but not so they could discuss it, or to help Malcolm process it. But there was no possibility that he could do that.

“Leave it alone, Euan.”

Euan sighed. “Come and get a feed, then.”

Completely on autopilot, Malcom followed him into the dining room, where Gordon was serving up stew, and forced conversation. If this was his life now, he’d better get fucking used to it.


	16. Box of Horrors

The decline in Malcolm’s mood continued into the rest of the coming week. Nicola continued to tolerate him, though she seemed to have long given up on getting any sense out of him. If Malcolm was honest with himself, he didn’t really believe he had much in the way of sense to give her. He was tied up in knots, overthinking and never feeling, until it crossed his mind that he’d very much like to put a hose pipe from the exhaust of his car to the driver’s window and simply fall asleep.

By Thursday – the thirtieth – the kids were having their last overnight stay at Victoria’s of the year. Nicola was upstairs playing the Wii with them, and Malcolm was left chopping vegetables in the silent kitchen with Victoria. “Speak, dear boy,” she eventually said. “For fuck’s sake, do us all a favour, and speak.”

Malcolm pulled open the cutlery drawer and put a teaspoon in his mouth before he set about dicing onions. Victoria huffed and filled a large pot with water.

What could he say? That he wasn’t able for this? That he didn’t want to endure this? That he was on the verge of walking out on them all, or worse?

“You can’t keep going like this,” she informed him matter-of-factly. “You’ll either destroy Nicola or yourself, or both.” Did she realise he literally could not answer her with a spoon in his mouth? “You’re shutting down, Malcolm. Anybody with a pair of eyes and a bit of bloody common sense can see that. You think you’re not feeling anything, and that might be true, for now. But you’re just making it fucking harder on yourself when it eventually comes to get you.”

Malcolm tried to block Victoria out. He hated this about her. She, more than anyone else, had him pegged. She had done from the very beginning, from that first morning they had met. He had no hope of denying anything when it came to her, and he wasn’t fool enough to try it. She would only drag it out until he could not bear any further questioning.

He took the spoon out of his mouth and washed his hands; ever since an unfortunate incident as a young boy, he had been somewhat paranoid that he might touch his eyes with an onion’s juices still on his hands, and so instinctively washed after every chopping of an onion.

“It all boils down to fear,” Victoria continued, peeling a turnip. Her knife slipped, missing her fingers by millimetres.

“Watch yourself on that neep, Victoria,” he replied, though his warning was sincere. He didn’t particularly want her to take the tops of her fingers off with that knife.

She ignored him. “You’re not the only one who’s scared here, you know. Nicola’s the one who’s got the fucking cancer.”

“Yeah, and I’m the one who might lose my wife before I even get to marry her,” he snapped, slamming his knife through a potato in temper. “But nobody fucking thinks about that.”

Victoria looked up at him. “Then fucking marry her, Malcolm.”

“What d’you think I proposed for?!” he retorted. “Fuck knows it wasn’t for the good of my fucking sanity.”

“There are practical implications, too, you know,” Victoria reminded him. “You’ve got more rights as her husband than you do as her fiancée.”

“Who says romance is dead?” snorted Malcolm.

Victoria smiled slightly. “You know that’s not what I mean.”

Malcolm continued chopping potatoes; it was the only thing standing between him and conversations he really did not want to have. Victoria meant well – she always did – but marrying Nicola right now was not an option. She was too ill, and he was too fucked up. It would never work out. Their relationship was hanging by a thread as it was; Malcolm wasn’t stupid enough to believe his recent demeanour wasn’t putting them under immense strain. He knew he was being a cunt, and he knew Nicola had given him more rope than he deserved. At some stage, though, he was bound to hang himself with it.

“Everything is relative in this life, Malcolm,” Victoria sighed, reaching around him to scoop up the diced onions in her hands and throw them in the pot. “Whether or not we know it, we compare everything we feel to things we’ve felt before. And I _know_ there are things in your life that have caused you as much pain as this. A different kind of pain, maybe, but pain nevertheless. If you, at sixteen, can come out of that a good man, you can fucking well buck up and-”

“I don’t feel pain,” Malcolm blurted out, not completely of his own volition, the knife shaking in his hand.

Victoria put a hand on his arm and turned him to face her. “Then what _do_ you feel, my boy?” She gently removed the vegetable knife from his hand and set it down on the counter; did she think he might harm her? Surely she knew him better than that, after over a year of him being with her daughter.

“Empty,” confessed Malcolm. He closed his eyes. “Or angry. One or the fucking other. Nothing in between.”

When he opened his eyes, Victoria was staring up at him. “You, kid, are depressed,” she told him, poking him softly on the chest.

“I’m fucking nothing of the sort,” Malcolm retorted.

“Do you know how many men I’ve seen pass through my Emergency Department, telling me they tried to off themselves because they got to a point where they only had numbness or anger left to them?!” Victoria argued. “I was an A and E consultant, Malcolm! I saw it every week of my working life, and it left me constantly furious that we expect men to shut the fuck up and let it kill them! The leading cause of death in men fifty and under is suicide, for fuck’s sake!”

So _that_ was where Nicola got her hatred of macho pride and silence. She must have listened to Victoria’s opinions on the matter most of her life. It was so easy to forget Victoria had run an Accident and Emergency Department before she retired. She wasn’t the stereotypical image of a female doctor; her ferocity and her intense nature overshadowed her capacity for care and attentiveness. It occurred to him in that moment that Victoria hadn’t taken the knife from him for her own safety. She had taken it in case he harmed himself.

“I’m fine,” he said coldly. He could almost see the walls going up around him as he picked up the knife and another potato.

Victoria, however, had other plans. She snatched the knife out of his hand. “You,” she said, waving the knife in his face, “are not fucking stupid, so stop acting like you are!”

“Mum!” a shout came from the door. Nicola dove into the room and grabbed the knife from Victoria’s hand.

“Fuck,” Victoria muttered. “It’s okay, Nicola. Malcolm and I were just having a difference of opinion on whether you’re meant to put swede or carrot in the pot first.”

Nicola looked up at Malcolm; Victoria pulled a face at him, telling him without words to play along. “Who the fuck puts the carrot in before the neep?” Malcolm asked, forcing a slight smile. “They’ll go to fucking mush.”

Nicola, though she seemed to accept this explanation, glared at Victoria. “Just be bloody careful with knives, will you?!” She handed the knife back to her mother and rounded on Malcolm. “The kids want to see you before we leave.”

He nodded curtly, glad to get out of the minefield; he glanced at Victoria on his way out the room, hoping she would get his silent message to keep her opinions on his mental health to herself with Nicola around.

When he got up the stairs, he found Ella, Sophie and Ben sitting around the television, the start of _Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone_ playing. “Guys, that’s your mum and me going now. Have fun and we’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” he said.

They all stood up. “Okay,” Sophie grinned.

“See you later,” Ben said.

“Bye,” smiled Ella. “Love you.”

Malcolm stared at her.

“Yeah, love you,” echoed Sophie.

“Love you, Malcolm,” Ben added.

They all gave him a hug and sat back down to their film, like they’d said nothing of consequence. Malcolm, despite himself, because they were only children and were putting their trust in him, said quietly but clearly, “I love you. Have a good night, guys.”

He ran back down the stairs, back to Nicola and Victoria. “Right,” he said, “that’s us away, Victoria.”

She was stirring her soup pot, but turned around when he spoke, and set the wooden spoon to one side. She hugged Nicola and said, “Enjoy the peace.”

Nicola laughed and kissed her mother’s cheek. She left the room to go and get her coat, and Malcolm went to follow her. But Victoria caught him by the hand and turned him around into a tight cuddle. “Don’t leave it until you’re one of those men on my ward,” she said gently into his ear. “Either go to the doctor, or try and take steps to do what has half a chance of making you happy.”

For only a split second, he could feel that, just maybe, Victoria was trying to help him. Would he have told her the truth if he didn’t instinctively believe that to be true? He held her close, thankful that, for better or worse, she actually cared enough to make him speak up when she knew she had the ability to. Even when Nicola returned wearing her coat and holding Malcolm’s, he was still standing in Victoria’s arms, not entirely sure if he could let go of the one person who now knew why he could not behave like a rational human being.

“Take care of yourself,” she ordered him. Though she tried to sound casual about it, he could hear the sincerity of the message that lay beneath: fucking behave yourself and don’t do anything the rest of us will regret.

Nicola, when she gave Malcolm his coat, shot him a quizzical look, but didn’t say anything until they were halfway home. “What was all that about with my mum?”

“Nothing,” Malcolm replied. “Just wishing me a happy new year.” He glanced around at her to find Nicola wasn’t believing a word of it. He hadn’t really expected her to; she might swallow a lie about a dispute but, as far as she knew, there was no reason for her mother and partner to be so powerfully bonding in the kitchen.

“How are we going to cope with everyone in our house on New Year’s Eve?” Nicola groaned.

“What you’re really asking is how you’re going to deal with five children, two Scots, two Travellers, a young Irishwoman and your mother on Hogmanay,” he clarified. “To which I would answer, nobody can fucking deal with that, so just let it happen.”

“Thanks for the reassurance,” laughed Nicola.

“At least Jamie can be fucking controlled in the house,” Malcolm reminded her. “We’ll just have to make him sleep on the sofa.”

Nicola sniggered; Malcolm knew she was recalling Jamie staggering down the street last month. Malcolm didn’t really want a repeat of that, as amusing as it might have been while they were all drunk. They got out of the car and into the house. It was eerily quiet without three children running around causing chaos. They were good kids – of course they were – but they were kids. There was always a noisy toy, or a petty squabble, or endless curious questioning. It was strange to hear his own footfalls in this house.

Malcolm remembered suddenly he had promised to put up shelves in Sophie’s room, to hold her fairies. He didn’t say anything at all. He simply headed up the stairs and pulled the shelf kit out of the airing cupboard. It was a simple task, but it gave him something to think about that wasn’t a worry over Nicola’s health or a frustration with his own inability to be a human being. The methodical nature of it, making order out of a cardboard box of chaos, settled him a little. At least, it did until one of the screws fell under Sophie’s bed and he could not for the life of him find it. And that little pressure, to find a screw under his stepdaughter’s bed, snapped his temper. He went from nothing to rage in seconds, with no means of halting himself.

“For fuck’s sake!” he roared as he got to his feet. He darted down the stairs and kicked the sideboard on his way to the kitchen.

“Malcolm!” shouted Nicola from the dining room she was setting in preparation for dinner tomorrow. “What the fucking hell has got into you?!”

He heard a metallic thump as Nicola put the pile of cutlery down onto the dining table and crossed the threshold to the kitchen. The sight of her standing there, confused and worried, only made him angrier than he already was; she was his to protect, and all he seemed to bring to her was a whole load of his shit she could probably do without. “I lost one of the fucking screws for that fucking stupid bastard of a fucking shelf,” he growled, kicking one of the stools to the floor.

“Malcolm, calm down!” Nicola said. “It’s no big deal. We’ll find it.”

But Malcolm could not calm down.

Every last one of his fears, anxieties, frustrations and uncertainties boiled over, and he could not stifle them any longer. Nicola approached him, but he raised his hands and took a backwards step, gesturing for her to stop, because he could not be sure that he was totally in control here. He didn’t _feel_ in control. Something else was pulling his strings, but he could not name it. He was detached from what he knew he was supposed to do.

The house’s silence crashed around him, ringing in his ears.

Instinct forced his hands over his ears, but it didn’t block out the shrill tone. Overwhelmed, he kicked the cupboard with such force that it rattled.

Nicola was going to die.

She was going to endure slow torture.

The children were going to have to watch that.

 _He_ was going to have to watch that.

The children were eventually going to rely solely on him.

He was going to lose Bella for a second time.

He couldn’t cope.

He was going mad.

Nicola’s hands pulled his arms down, taking his hands from his ears, with more strength than he had estimated she had in her. “Malcolm, look at me,” she urged him. He looked anywhere but at Nicola. The problem was that he couldn’t find anything else but Nicola’s face to focus on. “Malcolm!” He looked her straight in the eyes; she was scared – that much was obvious to him even now – but she still loved him. He tried to wrestle her off, but she held on. He couldn’t stand still, but he was all too aware that he was dragging Nicola around the kitchen.

He wanted to kick something. Break something. The only thing stopping him tearing this kitchen down bit by bit was the knowledge that Nicola was in the firing line if he did and, no matter what he wanted to do, he could not bring himself to harm her.

She put her arms around him and forced his head down into her neck. In that instant, every modicum of rage in him gave way to pure fear.

As he held on to Nicola with a desperate grasp, Malcolm finally understood it. Not all his anger was anger. It was fear. His numbness was not rooted in the inability to feel; he was numb because he was so scared of feeling the grief that came with the idea that Nicola might die. Maybe Victoria was right – maybe he _was_ depressed. In fact, if he was intellectual about it, he knew she probably was right. But he was depressed because every fibre of his being wanted to grieve for someone he had not yet lost.

Was it possible to grieve for someone who was still living? For someone who stood right here, holding him like he was the most precious thing on Earth?

“Talk to me,” Nicola said. “Malcolm, please, talk to me, before you have some sort of fucking breakdown.”

“You’ve got fucking enough on your mind,” he murmured.

“There’s always space for you.”

He stepped back from her and pulled his hand over his face, like it might give him time to think about what he wanted to do about this. Nicola was watching him intently, her eyes following his every move. Malcolm turned and opened the cupboard, took out the whisky bottle and a glass, and poured himself a drink.

Glass in hand, he walked past Nicola and headed to the living room, where he sat down on the sofa and stared into the empty grate. Within moments, Nicola was sitting next to him, her head on his shoulder as she stroked his arm.

“I don’t fucking want you to die,” he finally admitted.

“I’m not going to fucking die.”

“You can’t promise that, Nic’la.”

Nicola reached up and turned his face. “Malcolm, are you…are you _scared_?”

She said it like it was inconceivable, impossible, like it could never be true. And that expectation of him, though Nicola always professed she did not demand it of him, was not one to which he could live up. Not this time.

“I don’t know what I am,” he muttered. “Scared, sad, angry, fucking numb…I don’t fucking know anymore!” he snapped, suddenly frustrated with himself yet again. “Inadequate,” he added, his voice bouncing off the walls.

“You are _not_ inadequate!” Nicola exclaimed. “You’re more than adequate. You’re…you’re…” she began, but she clearly could not find the right words.

Though none of this made him feel better even in the slightest, Nicola now knew the truth, and had the information she needed to understand why he was behaving erratically; he didn’t do this for himself. He did this for Nicola. He did it so his behaviour did not alarm her as much as he knew it recently had, and so she could know it was not her doing. All he wanted to do was minimise her stress. As he could not control his behaviour for long enough to change it, he had to at least explain it.

“You’re my strength,” Nicola said into the silence. “You’re my courage. When I let go, you always hold on, Malcolm. And when I cry, you’re usually the one drying my eyes. When I’m weak, lost, scared, fucked up…you love me anyway. And you think you’re inadequate?”

Tears stung Malcolm’s eyes. He had never known that was how Nicola saw him. He had understood she loved him, but not that she could pinpoint what made her love him, or that it was not broad and undefined as he always presumed love to be.

Malcolm looked up at the ceiling, as his sister always told him to do when he thought he might cry. It did help; he did not outright cry, though it did very little to dissolve the hard lump in his throat. “Your mum reckons I’m depressed,” he said, unable to ignore the hoarseness of his own voice.

“I reckon she’s right.”

“But-”

“But nothing, Malcolm. In the past two months, you’ve found out in completely the wrong way that you have a daughter, that same daughter nearly got herself killed, and your partner has been diagnosed with depression and stage three cancer. If all that triggered depression in you, it is nothing to be fucking ashamed of.”

He swallowed his whisky in one, not entirely convinced by her argument. “I suppose we better go and find this fucking screw.”

Nicola sighed, and Malcolm knew she had been hoping he might grant her full access to the box of horrors in his head; the issue there was that if he wanted to grant anyone access to that box, it meant he had to actually open it, not just lift open the lid half an inch and peer through the crack.

“I’ll go and get a torch and a magnet.”


	17. No Matter What

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi!
> 
> In moving news: no broadband until December 4th because, as great as SSE are, they need Openreach to get their shit together and fix a line; my brother has found my proximity to the bus stop extremely handy and is asking me to work football matches at weekends because he never has enough stewards; and I nearly died putting curtains up. A footstool on top of a kitchen chair isn't a great substitute for a stepladder when you're five foot one. Take note, kids.
> 
> I have another three to four chapters in line for this; all are set on this same night. All will become apparent. I think.

Hogmanay came in a rush of moving furniture – neither Malcolm nor Nicola had the patience to listen to complaints about knees cracked on the coffee table or thighs bruised on the corner of the sideboard – and cooking what they could in advance. The trip to the supermarket for alcohol ended with Malcolm roaring, for the whole car park to hear as the unloaded alcohol into the boot, “For fuck’s sake, does anyone use their fucking eyes?! Is Hogmanay just an excuse to let your fucking brain cells fall out your fucking ears?!”

Nicola, with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a bottle of whisky in the other, stared at him for a brief second and burst out laughing. She didn’t stop. Laughter took her body over until the bottles were placed clumsily in the boot and she was hanging on to Malcolm, her breathing uneven. “Calm down,” Malcolm chuckled. “Christ. It’s not _that_ fucking funny.”

“It is,” she sniggered. “You realise we don’t do that down here? In London?”

“What?”

“Speak our minds about New Year’s Eve at Tesco.”

Malcolm shook his head. For the first time in what felt like decades, he gave a true smile. How could something so insignificant as Nicola laughing at him in a supermarket car park be what sparked some sort of tangible joy in him?

“C’mon, you daft bat,” he smirked. “Car’s not gonna load itself and we look like a couple of fucking raging alcoholics here!”

Perhaps it was the festive air – New Year had always been a bigger party than Christmas for him – or perhaps some of the things he had let out last night had helped, but he felt a little lighter, no longer completely crushed under the weight of every worst-case scenario he had managed to dream up.

He watched her return the trolley and reclaim her pound coin; today was a good day. To look at her, nobody would ever have guessed she had cancer. She was cheery, agile – or as agile as Nicola Murray and her five left feet ever were – and very much looking forward to having her home invaded by the rowdiest of friends, family and colleagues. After discussion with Bella, they had abolished bedtime for all five children and adopted a “nap or sleep where you drop” policy for one night only. It was sure to make Sophie, Ben, Alasdair and Eilidh unbearable the next day, but Ella would manage perfectly well, and there was no point in wrestling into bed children who knew there was a party to be had.

It was when Victoria came around with Ben, Sophie and Ella at two o’clock that Malcolm was reminded what it was to be part of a family, be it by blood or choice. They were running around the place, already high on cherryade and chocolate, with those fucking Nerf guns Victoria had got them for Christmas. Within half an hour of being both deliberately targeted and caught in the crossfire, Malcolm bellowed through the house, “Victoria, I am going to stick one of those fucking things up your fucking arse and pull the fucking trigger!” Victoria shot his ear with a smirk, leaving him waving a pastry brush around saying, “You just mind whose party food you’re putting in your mouth when you’re off your face tonight, Victoria! I’m pretty sure there’s still some fucking fly killer under the sink!” The kids fell about laughing while Malcolm tried to make sausage rolls in the midst of the chaos.

He went through to put wine on the table, but frowned. “Nicola! Why have you set the dining room up for fifteen? Five kids, me, you, Jamie, Bella, Euan, Victoria, Aoife,” he reeled off. “That’s only twelve!”

Nicola appeared at the door laden with cans of Coke and lemonade. “Don’t know, darling. I must have miscounted,” she smiled. She was lying, and Malcolm knew it, but he didn’t see any way to get it out of her with the kids running around their feet and Victoria hovering where she was least expected. However, that wasn’t going to stop him.

He pulled her gently into the room and closed the door, lifting the cans out of her arms and onto the nearest chair. “Who else is coming?” he asked.

Nicola grinned. “Patience, Malcolm,” she scolded him.

“I never did have much patience,” he reminded her. “Oh, fuck’s sake, it’s not the PM? Or the fucking baldy bastard?!”

“Nicolson?” Nicola snorted. “I’m not _that_ stupid!”

Malcolm leaned in, his lips less than an inch from hers. “Tell me.”

“No,” she grinned.

He kissed her with such intensity that nobody would have blamed her for blurting it out in shock but, to Malcolm’s slight surprise, she held her silence and returned the kiss with a wondrous enthusiasm, pulling him in until all the space between them was closed. “Still not telling,” she breathed out between harsh kisses.

“I could make it worth your while,” he offered.

“Oh, you will,” Nicola smiled against his lips. “Tomorrow. I, unlike you, understand that good things come to those who _wait_.”

The door flew open and they were bombarded with foam bullets as four people began to discharge their entire stock of ammunition upon them. Nicola half-screamed, half-laughed, and used Malcolm as a human shield; he jumped out of the way, leaving open fire raining down upon Nicola. “Malcolm, you bastard!” she laughed as she covered her head with her arms.

After the last bullet was fired and the kids were on their knees to find their spent rounds, Malcolm grabbed Nicola by the waist and kissed her. This was it. This was what he had to remember to hang on to. This woman, who kissed fiercely and loved without fear, was his lover. His partner. But for a piece of paper and a ring, she was his wife.

“Ugh, Mum! Dad! Get a room!” Ella shouted in disgust. When Malcolm and Nicola broke apart to look at Ella, they found her underneath the smaller of the two dining tables set up – the one for the kids – interrupting in retrieving her orange foam bullets.

Nicola smirked and kissed him one last time, earning a roll of Ella’s eyes while she pretended to retch onto the floor. Malcolm hugged Nicola tightly as she giggled into his chest; he had to wonder if the painkillers had gone to her head today, for she was higher than a four-year-old on every fucking E-number in existence. But why was he so inclined to blame her giddy mood on the drugs? Was it entirely impossible that she was happy because, well, she was happy? She was warmer, softer, than she had been in a long, long time, with more optimism about her than he could ever recall seeing. Maybe the antidepressants were doing their job and she could see now all she had, rather than all she did not. Or maybe it was New Year’s Eve and she was looking forward to sharing it with their dysfunctional family and friends, like most would expect her to.

It occurred to him that cancer didn’t change the fundamentals of who Nicola Murray was. It just made her a little more fragile.

A wife with cancer was still a wife. If he ever got to marry her.

“Then fucking marry her, Malcolm,” an old echo of Victoria’s voice rang in his ears.

At half past five, the doorbell rang, and Bella, Euan and their children and au pair entered the house. Eilidh and Alasdair instantly ran to find the rest of the kids, while Malcolm took Bella’s coat from her. “You in a fucking better mood yet?” she shot at him, an eyebrow raised as she gave him the harshest of glares – the kind she generally reserved for her most incompetent civil servants.

Malcolm, hesitant as he was, took a risk. He kissed his daughter’s temple for the first time as he said, “It’s Hogmanay. Let’s all get hammered and forget everything until the second of January.” He picked up the docking station Nicola had bought and wrapped for Aoife yesterday – having not got her a present before, thinking she wouldn’t be here at all under well after New Year – and chucked it to the girl. “Happy fucking Christmas. You’re in charge of music, right?”

Aoife grinned. “Thank you!” she exclaimed.

Once Bella and Euan were heading to the kitchen to greet Nicola and meet Victoria, Malcolm pulled Aoife aside, into the living room with the kids. “How do you feel about doing some...stuff with the kids?” he asked her. “It’ll only take about half an hour and we’re not eating ‘til seven,” he added hastily. He didn’t want Aoife to think he was taking advantage of her role as au pair to two of the five kids.

Aoife frowned slightly, but did not seem annoyed. “What’re you up to?” she asked him curiously.

He grabbed the notepad from the TV unit and said, “This is what I’d need yous to make, or find, or whatever,” as he scribbled things down off the top of his head.

Aoife read as he wrote, with a look of realisation spreading across her face. “Ah, Malcolm, no, she’ll go feckin’ mad!”

Malcolm looked up at her, glancing at the kids on the other side of the room; they were completely absorbed in Sophie’s fairies. “Nicola,” Malcolm whispered carefully, “is very, very fucking ill. So, Aoife-”

Her face dropped slightly. “What?”

“I’m not going into details,” he warned her, with a pointed look towards the children.

“Okay,” Aoife sighed, taking the notepad from him. “Should get everything together by quarter past six,” she added, scanning the list.

Malcolm gave a small smile. “Thank you, Aoife.”

“Yer mad, Malcolm Tucker,” she grinned. “Yer feckin’ mad.”

“Old news, that is,” he replied on his way out the door.

“Right, you bunch of little maggots!” he heard Aoife laugh, rounding up the kids. “We are on a mission!”

Malcolm went and joined Nicola, Victoria, Bella and Euan in the kitchen. Victoria was in the middle of telling Nicola to leave one of the pots alone, while Bella and Euan looked on in amusement. “Is it always like this?” Bella asked with one of her sharp-toothed grins.

“What, when Victoria catches Nicola cooking?” Malcolm said, opening the fridge door and taking out a can of lager. “Only every fucking time,” he smirked. “I’d intervene but I’m not sure who’d murder me first.”

Just as Malcolm went to sit down, the doorbell went again. It was Jamie McDonald. His first question was, “How’re you lot bearin’ up?”

“Fine. But the kids don’t know anything so keep fucking quiet.”

“Does that include Bella?” Jamie dared to ask.

Malcolm glared at him, but answered the question nonetheless. “Aye, it fucking includes Bella.”

They went to the kitchen, where Euan already had a drink ready for Jamie, and Bella, Victoria and Nicola seemed to be having a fucking intense conversation about the best methods to roast beef. Malcolm knew Nicola barely knew how to turn the oven on, and it made him laugh inwardly to see her debating something she knew fuck all about. Then he remembered, with less amusement, Nicola did that on a daily basis at DoSAC.

Aoife bounded in and took the flowers out of their vase on the window sill. “What the-” Nicola began, but Malcolm chose to distract her.

“Your pan’s burning,” he told her.

She whipped around, turning on her heel, only to find the pan was perfectly fine. “Twat,” she shot at him, though she did so with a smirk.

Over the next twenty minutes, the conversation became rowdier, until Bella challenged Jamie to an arm wrestle which, to Jamie’s indignation, Bella won. He was shouting for a rematch when Aoife poked her head in the door and gestured for Malcolm to follow her. So he did, still second guessing his rather fucking rash decision making here. But when he got to the living room, and saw how excited all the children were, and how they’d created their own version of what it was meant to be, he knew he was doing the right thing.

“Right, then!” Aoife smiled. “Ella, go and get everyone in except your mam. And tell your nan to turn the pots off – don’t want the feckin’ house burnin’ to the ground. Sophie and Ben, go and meet your mam at the door with this,” she ordered, handing a multitude of objects to the two kids. “Malcolm, get your arse over here ‘til I sort you out.”

Malcolm obeyed, watching as Eilidh and Alasdair made finishing touches of glitter amongst the fairies on the floor. If not for the occasion, Malcolm didn’t doubt he probably would have gone fucking mental about them putting glitter on the floor – that shit didn’t lift for hell nor high water.

Jamie led the crowd into the room, can still in hand, and asked, “What the fuck’s goin’ on?!” He passed a sweeping look over the room and said, “Fuck’s sake, Malcolm, you lost the bloody plot?!”

“Christ on a bike!” Bella groaned. “Don’t tell me you’re-”

“Alright, calm down!” Aoife called. “Who’s doin’ the honours, anyway?” she demanded, starting a song on her new iPod on her new docking station.

Bella, Euan, Jamie and Victoria glanced at one another, until Victoria sighed, “I’ll do it. I daresay I’m the idiot who put the idea in his head.” She got to her feet, and they all stared at Malcolm like he’d lost his mind. And perhaps he had.

“What the hell is going on?!” Nicola was demanding from the hallway. A moment passed before she shouted, “For fuck’s sake, Malcolm! Seriously?!”

Ella, Ben and Sophie bounced back into the room, and Alasdair handed Aoife something that she dropped into her cardigan pocket.

At the doorway, she stood wearing a veil – a section of net curtain glued to one of Sophie’s old hairbands – and a white shawl – the rest of the net curtain – draped around her shoulders. She held the kitchen flowers in her hands and a look of exasperated love on her face. It was the same look Malcolm imagined he himself often held.

“… _now be at ease, we’re not leaving; we are fearful what comes_ ,” the music played as Nicola stepped into a course set out for her by glitter, fairies and their homes. “ _There is grace in the madness when all seasons come at once. We are safe in the arms of the unknown; we just need to remind you that the brave can carry on_.”

Halfway up the makeshift aisle, even through her veil of netting, Malcolm could see Nicola shoot both a glare and a smile at him.

“ _No matter what, there is a new day on its way; and, no matter what, there is more love to be made. And no matter what, there is a new day on its way; and, no matter what, there is more love to be made_.”

Nicola stood opposite Malcolm, who lifted her veil over her head. “You’re a twat,” she told him for what seemed like the hundredth time this year.

“I know,” he replied; Nicola handed her flowers to Ella, who stood grinning behind her mother.

Victoria rolled her eyes. “Now, does anyone know of any reason this pair of idiots can’t get married?” she paraphrased the standard question. Everyone laughed, but nothing more. “Right, Malcolm,” Victoria said, “Take Nicola’s hands and repeat after me. I, Malcolm...”

“I, Malcolm…”

“Do take thee, Nicola Eleanor…”

“Do take thee, Nicola Eleanor…”

“To be my wife…”

“To be my wife…”

“To have and to hold from this day forth…”

“To have and to hold from this day forth…”

“To love and to cherish…”

“To love and to cherish…”

“For better, for worse…”

“For better, for worse…”

“For richer, for poorer…”

“For richer, for poorer…”

“In sickness and in health…”

“In sickness and health,” Malcolm repeated. Nicola looked at the floor, and Malcolm knew her only too well – he wasn’t surprised to see her crying, but he would not reprimand her for it.

“Forsaking all others…”

“Forsaking all others…”

“For as long as we both shall live.”

“For as long as we both shall live.”

Aoife handed him a ring, cut from the tube from a roll of wrapping paper and decorated liberally with gold glitter by the children; Malcolm pushed it onto Nicola’s finger as she shook her head. She knew this was madness. Malcolm knew this was madness, for fuck’s sake. But it was better than the idea of letting her die without any sort of a wedding.

“Nicola, take Malcolm’s hands and repeat after me. I, Nicola Eleanor…” Victoria said.

“I, Nicola Eleanor…”

“Do take thee, Malcolm…”

“Do take this mental bastard, Malcolm…” Nicola grinned tearfully. Their little congregation laughed before Victoria tried to bring them back to some order.

“To be my husband…”

“To be my husband…”

“To have and to hold from this day forth…”

“To have and to hold from this day forth…”

“To love and to cherish…”

“To love and to cherish…”

“For better, for worse…”

“For better, for worse…”

“For richer, for poorer…”

“For richer, for poorer…”

“In sickness and in health…”

“In sickness and health,” Nicola said, not even smiling as she said it. Malcolm squeezed her hands tightly.

“Forsaking all others…”

“Forsaking all others…”

“For as long as we both shall live.”

“For as long as we both shall live.”

Victoria added, “Which, in this case, is as long as it takes Malcolm to drive someone to murder him.” Even Malcolm laughed while Aoife handed Nicola a ring of the same style she had given Malcolm, though a bit bigger.

Nicola put it on Malcolm’s finger and told him, “You really are a headcase.”

“Takes one to know one,” he retorted.

Victoria cleared her throat and said, “And, even though I have absolutely no power to do so, I now declare you husband and wife. Now kiss so I can go and save the roast potatoes from incineration!”

Malcolm leaned in and kissed Nicola, while the rest of them cheered them and threw what appeared to be the contents of the hole punch from the sideboard drawer over them. The next ten minutes passed with the kids excitedly scrambling around the floor, picking up Sophie’s fairies and lifting them out of harm’s way, while adults congratulated a mock wedding – and they had the cheek to tell Malcolm _he_ was the mad one.

The doorbell rang, so Malcolm pushed through the throng to answer it. When he opened the door, he was startled to find the snow had started up once more, swirling past the streetlights outside. When he finally looked at the person standing on his doorstep, he lost the ability to speak.

“Happy New Year, Malcolm.”

He heard Nicola coming out to the hallway, but he was too stunned to turn around and ask her what the fuck was going on when she clung to his arm.

“Are you gonna invite me in or let me turn into Frosty the fucking Snowman?”


	18. Verity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!
> 
> It's been a mad day. My brother roped me into stewarding a football match, during which I had a smoke bomb let off in my face, broke up a brawl at the segregation gate and genuinely watched a man try to scale the wall to get back in the stadium after being ejected for bad behaviour. I was meant to man the corner of the pitch to deter a pitch incursion, but I didn't actually get there until thirty-five minutes in because so much shit was going down in the stands. But, I would 100% do it again.

Without another thought, Malcolm practically leapt forward and took her into a rib-destroying cuddle. He had never in his life been so happy to see his beautiful, tough, unpredictable, kind, patient pain in the arse of a little sister. “Adam’s just getting Erin out the car. Little shit fell asleep halfway down and probably won’t sleep more the night,” she said into his ear. “Malc, you’re hurting me now!”

“Sorry,” he muttered, his eyes closed as he loosened his grip. “I just…why are you here, Verity?”

Verity pulled away to look up at him. “Nicola invited us, ages ago. Booked us a hotel and everything,” she said. “Didn’t she tell you?”

“No,” Malcolm replied, turning around to see Nicola, who was biting her lip with a smile. “No, she fucking didn’t.”

A little girl of eight bounded up the driveway, her father trailing behind her, and dived into Malcolm’s arms. Had he not known exactly what his niece was like, and had he not steadied himself in anticipation, Erin might have bowled him over. “Uncle Malcolm!” she shouted.

“Hello, darlin’,” he laughed; keeping Erin in his arms, he gestured for his sister and brother-in-law to cross the threshold. Nicola shut the door behind them. Adam passed opened a bag into which Nicola peered.

“Oh, fucking hell, not Irn Bru again,” moaned Nicola. “Last time he had that mixed with vodka he asked me to marry him.”

Verity threw her head back laughing; Malcolm hadn’t realised how much he missed his sister. He felt a little uneasy about how little attention he had paid her over the last year. Between Nicola and her children, and then Bella, he had spared very little time to even text Verity, never mind call her. He could have, if he had taken the notion to, visited her when he was in Scotland on Christmas Eve, but he had been so preoccupied that it didn’t even cross his mind to take a short detour to Glasgow.

He pressed a kiss into Erin’s pitch-black hair and set her down on solid ground. “Through there,” he said to her, pointing to the living room, “are your cousins.”

Nicola held out her hand. “Come with me,” she smiled. Erin, albeit with obvious caution, took Nicola’s hand and went with her. Malcolm took the bag from Adam and led them to the kitchen, where he put the bag on the table.

Victoria turned at the sound, wearing a smile. “Oh, who’s this?” she asked, wiping her hands on a tea towel.

“Uh, this is my sister,” Malcolm replied. “Verity. And her husband, Adam. They’ve got a wee girl, Erin. She’s in the living room with Nicola. Who, it seems, invited them months ago without fucking telling me.”

“Well,” Victoria chuckled, shaking both Verity and Adam’s hands, “that explains the three redundant place settings.”

“She didn’t tell you, either?” Malcolm asked. That did surprise him a little.

“Nope,” Victoria said, returning her attention to the gravy she was mixing. “Not a word.”

“Hmm,” Malcolm muttered. He opened the bag and pulled out a two-litre bottle of Irn Bru. There were also bottles of Red Cola and cans of Barrs cherryade. “Fuck’s sake, you actually trying to keep the kids awake right through to the twelfth night of fucking Christmas?!”

Victoria bustled past them and stood in the middle of the hallway. “DINNER IN FIVE MINUTES!” she bellowed so everyone, whether downstairs or up, would hear her.

Malcolm went through to the dining room. Anxiety, though it had no reason to, kicked in. Maybe it was because Verity was here, and there was no lying to Verity Crichton. Not for him, anyway. There never had been. And now she was here and, while on the surface he was fine and in the mood for a good time, all the creatures that lurked in the murky waters below kept up their threat to drag him under.

He didn’t even know how much Verity was aware of, how much Nicola had told her. Did she know of his recent downward spiral, or of Nicola’s illness? Did she know she had a niece of her own?

Verity entered the room and closed the door behind her. “How are you?” she asked him. The question wasn’t casual, and she mad no attempt to pass it off as anything other than deadly fucking serious.

But he, in his unfailing stupidity, still attempted to answer it as a casual question. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. How are you? How’s Erin get-”

“Don’t fucking lie to me, Malcolm. We _are_ gonna speak about this, and we’re gonna do it before you get a fucking drink down you,” Verity interrupted him. “I know. I know everything.” She held his stare as she always did; she had learned very early into her childhood that if she intended to properly challenge her elder brother, she needed to maintain eye contact. “Nicola told me it all.”

Malcolm looked at the floor. He didn’t want to have this conversation.

“And frankly, I don’t want you turning back into the absolute fucking cunt you were after Dad died,” Verity informed him. “Because it all comes from the same fucking place, doesn’t it, Malcolm? It all comes from your life coming apart at the fucking seams, because you never know how to deal with it. I mean, you could talk to us, but no, you’d rather make us all fucking miserable. You know the time with you between Dad dying and you fucking off to Skye were fucking unbearable? Using me as your fucking-”

“Shut up,” he cut across her.

“As your fucking punchbag,” Verity finished her sentence. She would not be silenced. When Verity Crichton wanted to say something, she fucking said it. “I was twelve, Malcolm. _Twelve_. Even then, at that age, I knew you only did it because you couldn’t find a way to reconcile who you were with how you felt. Why do you think I have _never_ told Mum? I let her think I was fucking fighting at the school! I let her think _I_ was the one with the fucking anger management-”

“Verity!”

When he lifted his gaze from the floor, Verity was glaring defiantly at him. “You know, you never once apologised? You came back from Skye, went to university, and pretended none of it happened. So I did, too. Because, despite everything, you’re my brother, and I love every bone in your body. Even the bad ones.”

Malcolm stared at her. “I was in a half decent mood until you fucking opened your big mouth.”

He stalked past her and stormed down the hallway and up the stairs to his and Nicola’s bedroom. “Malcolm?” he heard Nicola call. Verity’s voice replied, but Malcolm could not make out what she said. The sound of people moving from the living room to the dining room drowned it out.

He sat on the bed, his head in his hands. Verity had just ripped open a gash he had long since stitched, however clumsily. He hated himself for how he had treated his sister. Back then, she had been tiny and, physically, an easy target. Not just to him – as soon as she got into the high school, the boys found it all too easy to touch her where they shouldn’t, because she was too small to fight them off. And against everyone else, he did always defend her. But when it came to their relationship…it became a complex mess. He did everything he could to defend Verity against the outside world, but when he snapped, he had been violent towards her. Malcolm never knew why she had never told their mother about his tendency to hit her or push her so hard that her back cracked against the opposite wall. Perhaps it was because there had been no repercussions for him that he had found it easier than he probably should have to ignore it. He found it all too easy to tell himself, and everyone else who asked, that it was simply that he dealt with it all differently; it wasn’t even a lie. It just so happened that ‘differently’ entailed bringing harm to the little sister that was his to protect.

There was a knock at the door, and in walked Verity. She sat down next to him on the bed. “I didn’t say all that to hurt you, Malcolm,” she said quietly. “Really, I didn’t. I forgave you for all that a long fucking time ago. But I don’t want it to happen again. I don’t want you to be in so much fucking pain that the only way you can deal with it is to pass it on to someone smaller than you.”

He watched his fingers move in unruly motions, fidgeting with nothing. “I am sorry, you know,” he told her. “I am so sorry. I hate myself for what I did to you.”

“I know,” Verity said simply. “And I wish you didn’t hate yourself for it. You were a kid, Malcolm. A kid who found his dad’s body hanging in the shed and never got any help afterwards. I know that. I know you blame yourself for what Dad did, too. Nobody ever bothered to tell you it wasn’t your fault. I know that now.” Malcolm looked up at the ceiling. “It wasn’t your fault, Malcolm. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Dad was ill. It was as simple as that.”

He turned to look at the clock on his bedside unit. They had about two minutes before Victoria would ambush them, vying for blood as dinner started to go cold. Right now, though, he could still hear her moving between the kitchen and dining room, and that meant she was still taking food through.

“I know everything. I know about Bella. I know about Nicola. I know about your anxiety attacks. I know you started kicking the house around last night because you lost a screw when you put up Sophie’s shelves. I know you tore your office apart last month.” Verity reached out and took Malcolm’s hand. “And I know you’re doing it all because you’re hurting. Because you’re depressed. Because you’re scared.”

Malcolm looked back up at the ceiling, fighting back the terrifying swarm of emotions threatening to stick their heads above the water.

“Look at me.”

Malcolm refused.

“Please.”

Against his better judgement, he did. He looked at his sister. Her shoulder-length, curly black hair was tucked behind her ears; her startlingly blue eyes – those eyes she had inherited from their father and that had been passed down to her niece – scrutinised every line on his face. “I think you’ve managed to make some peace with what happened with Bella,” she said gently. “What’s really wrong is Nicola has cancer and you don’t know what the fuck to do. And when Malcolm Tucker doesn’t know what to do, he defaults to being angry.”

Malcolm nodded his head. And that was it. Every part of him broke.

Verity got to her feet and put her arms around him, and the creatures that lurked so close to the surface reared their hideous heads. He was crying into his sister’s waist, hanging on to her for dear life, while she stroked his head gently with her hand. “You need to do this more often,” she told him. “See, this, we can deal with. You never did understand that, did you? Crying isn’t the worst thing you can do. We can help you if you cry. But if you’re cruel, and full of hate and anger, we’re so scared to go near you, there’s nothing we can do.”

Malcolm stood up and hugged Verity tightly, tears still pouring down his face.

“Promise me, Malcolm. Promise me you won’t hurt anyone – and that includes yourself,” she said into his ear. “I’m always on the other end of the phone. If you feel like it’s getting too much, all you have to do is call me.”

“I promise.”

“And promise me, when you need to cry, do it,” she added. “You’ll almost always feel better for letting it out. Don’t let it build up like that. No more looking at the ceiling.”

“Yeah,” he replied. “I promise.”

The door creaked open and, over Verity’s shoulder, he saw Victoria. “Dinner’s ready,” she smiled slightly. Malcolm and Verity separated and followed Victoria, Malcolm wiping his eyes on the sleeve of his sweater on his way down the stairs. Verity was right; he did feel a bit better. Less angry, anyway. Still fucking terrified of what next year might bring, but rage was no longer one of the creatures bobbing just under the surface. It had dived deeper below, less inclined to jump out and take control of him at the slightest provocation.

He sat down next to Nicola, who kissed his cheek and softly squeezed his leg.

Verity sat down on Adam’s right. To his left sat Bella, who was busy telling her daughter to stop naming animals again. “Don’t name, Eilidh!” she shouted over to the kids’ table.

“But everybody else calls them that!” protested Eilidh.

“You’re not everybody else!” Bella said firmly. “Quit the shan cairry on!”

“Sorry,” Eilidh relented, just as Victoria set a plate of food down in front of her.

Adam looked bemused for a moment before exclaiming, “Oh, this is the gypo lassie!”

The room fell silent. Aoife and Jamie exchanged a look; both knew Bella well enough to know just how much she hated that word. Bella glowered at Adam, and Malcolm knew she would gladly have slapped him. The only thing stopping her was Euan’s hand around her wrist. Verity, however, clipped him around the ear. “Excuse my husband,” she said, glaring at Adam, “for he is a racist prick. Had I known that, I’d never have married him.”

Adam looked stunned, clearly genuinely unaware that there was anything wrong with what he had just called Bella. “That happens to be my daughter you’re talking about,” Malcolm snarled.

“And my stepdaughter and, in case it slipped your mind, your niece. If you have any sense at all,” Nicola added, “you’ll apologise right now.”

“What am I meant to call her, like?” Adam half-laughed incredulously.

“‘Bella’ will do just fine,” Bella replied stiffly. “And for future reference, the next time I hear fucking casual racism come out of your mouth, you’ll need your jaw wired back together.”

“No,” Malcolm contradicted her threat of violence. “No, Bella.” He looked directly at Adam. “Let’s get this straight. Bella and her family are Travellers. Not gypos, tinks, knackers, minks, or any other racist slur that might occur to you. Last time I checked, Bella Whyte was MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber, and Secretary of State for Scotland, not ‘the gypo lassie’. If you don’t have anything nice to say, fucking shut up, right?”

Adam turned to speak to Bella. “I’m sorry. Please forgive that lapse of judgement.” He held a hand out to Bella, who shook it with blatant mistrust upon her face. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I just wasn’t thinking at all.”

“Apology accepted,” Bella finally said.

The atmosphere relaxed slightly as everyone let out a breath, safe in the knowledge Bella Whyte was not about to tear her uncle limb from limb. Malcolm met Bella’s stare across the table; her expression was strange, halfway between a smile and a frown. She eventually looked away to tell Victoria how good her cooking was, even with Nicola’s ‘help’, making everyone laugh and ridding the room of the last of the tension. Malcolm, however, continued to watch Bella, unnerved by the way she had looked at him.

Nicola noticed, put a hand on his arm and said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he replied honestly. “Nothing’s wrong. Just the way Bella was looking at me.”

“Oh,” Nicola said, sounding rather relieved. “That’s just because you fought her corner.”

“I’ve fought her corner before.”

“Never as her dad,” Nicola pointed out. “Ella’s the same, you know. Spoke to her about it the other night. She said the difference between you and James is that you treat her like a daughter and not an occupational inconvenience. Her words, not mine.”

“Someone’s expanding their vocabulary,” Malcolm snorted, taking a sip of wine.

“She’s been reading a lot more lately,” Nicola replied. “Nobody knows why, but I’m not complaining.”

To his left, Aoife and Verity were chatting enthusiastically. “…was in Navan,” Verity said. “County Meath.”

“Christ, my aunt and uncle live there!” Aoife exclaimed. “How long were you there?”

“Just a year,” Verity replied.

It had totally escaped Malcolm’s recollection that Verity had been an au pair in Ireland when she was young. Funny really, as that was how he had managed to convince Bella to take the Scottish Secretary job; his reassurance that there were alternatives to conventional childcare had persuaded her that she could indeed take on the job and still refrain from keeping her children in childcare outside of their home.

He had visited his sister during her time there. He vividly remembered getting drunk and almost getting hit by the bus headed for Dún Laoghaire – something Verity did not hesitate to relay to the rest of the table. “And d’you know what was the only thing he had to say?” Verity asked with a grin. “‘Where the fuck’s Dún Laoghaire, anyway?’”

Beside him, Nicola laughed heartily, her hand resting on her midriff as she took a drink of lemonade. She turned to the kids to make sure they were alright, and that Ben was actually eating his food and not just pushing it around the plate. When she returned her attention to the adults, she smiled up at Malcolm. Her silly mood had not lifted in the slightest, proven by the way she pulled him down into an unexpected kiss.

Malcolm was beginning to have misgivings about her behaviour. Though she seemed fit and able, this behaviour was not typical of Nicola unless she was drunk, and she hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol. His face must have given him away, because she looked him straight in the eyes and said, “I’m okay, Malcolm.”


	19. Be Brave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more week until I get broadband! And I can stop taking the bus to the arse end of nowhere to use my mum's WiFi. My brother is currently trying to convince me to get my SIA badge when I get internet access. Undecided.

Aoife’s taste in music was bizarre, not helped at all by Bella giving her the family Apple password and telling her to download whatever she liked. As a result, they dived from Scottish and Irish to rock to pop to country and back again. The girl herself was as bizarre as the music she played; Malcolm very rarely could work out what her opinion was, or whether or not she saw through the masks of those around her. He often thought she did see more than she let on, but he couldn’t be sure.

Malcolm ended up dancing with his sister; she had this compulsion to keep him close. Always had done, even when she should have wanted to run from him. Perhaps she did want to run from him, but had the courage and the compassion not to. She was one of those heroes who ran towards the crisis, just to see what or who she could salvage. Though it wound him up to no end, and it was the opposite of what he was inclined to do, at the end of the day, when he shouted himself hoarse and told her exactly what he thought of her ridiculous selflessness, he loved her for it.

“I’m just going for a drink. D’you want one?” Verity asked him.

“Yeah,” he replied. He was probably drinking more than he ought to, but at the moment, that was the only thing keeping him calm enough to properly function.

She walked away to the kitchen, and Malcolm looked around him. Jamie was dancing with Bella, Euan sitting on a couch speaking to Aoife and Victoria. Adam was playing some game with the younger kids, though Ella and Sophie seemed to have vanished up the stairs for a while. Nicola, Malcolm presumed, was in the kitchen; maybe Ella and Sophie were with her.

“ _…you woke up screaming aloud_ ,” he heard in the background. “ _A prayer from your secret god; you feed off our fears; and hold back your tears; oh, give us a tantrum; and a know-it-all grin; just when we need one; when the evening’s thin. You’re a beautiful; a beautiful fucked up man; you’re setting up your; razor wire shrine_.”

It was only just gone nine. None of the children showed any sign of tiredness; even little Alasdair was still up and running about, though that could well have been overtiredness right there.

Sophie entered the room, her arms laden with plastic cups and those hell sent cans of cherryade Adam and Verity had taken down the road. The vivid red they poured into the flimsy plastic cups screamed hyperactivity.

Someone was running up the stairs; probably Nicola. She spent half her life on stairs, trying to avoid lifts, and so when she was in flat shoes, nobody could keep up with her. She took at least two flights to everyone else’s one.

“You okay?” Bella asked him, having left Jamie.

“Yeah,” Malcolm replied.

“Listen,” she said, “thanks for sticking up for me earlier.”

“It’s fine,” he brushed off her gratitude.

Bella reached up and kissed his cheek. “No, Malcolm, I mean it. You didn’t have to do it.”

Malcolm snorted. “Like I’m going to sit back and listen to a fucking arsehole give any one of my children shit. Especially fucking racist shit.”

There was a cry of pain and a panicked shout from upstairs. Everyone stopped what they were doing and glanced at one another with expressions of worry and confusion. Everyone except Victoria, Aoife and Jamie, who all knew Nicola was sick.

“Malcolm!” screamed Ella. “Dad! Help!”

He didn’t hesitate. He took the stairs two at the time, to find Ella standing outside the bathroom, pointing at her mother, who was currently retching over the toilet. Nicola groaned loudly, her hands clutching her abdomen; Malcolm could tell she was pushing down the worst of the reaction to whatever was causing her pain. “It’s okay, Ella,” he assured her, stroking her hair to calm her down. “Your mum’s just not feeling well. You go back downstairs, tell everyone you’re okay. They’ll be worried.”

Ella seemed to fully understand what he was really saying: don’t tell anyone your mother’s ill. She nodded and quietly went downstairs, while he went to Nicola. He scraped her hair away from her face as she violently threw up. “I thought this block of chemo was finished,” he said, kneeling down beside her.

She was sick once more, and then leaned back to look at him. “It’s not the chemo,” she said. “It’s the pain.” She winced and let out what seemed to be a totally involuntary shout, doubled over for a moment.

“But you’ve got loads of-”

“I didn’t take them,” she told him. “I didn’t want a fuzzy head.”

Malcolm shook his head slightly and stood up, picking up one of the tumblers and filling it with water. “You fucking daft woman,” he sighed. “Better a fuzzy head than you in so much fucking pain it makes you sick.”

Nicola took the tumbler from him and shuffled backwards until she was leaning against the bath. Malcolm sat down on the floor beside her. He combed his fingers through her hair and kissed her cheek. This was why she was more alert than she had been of late. There were no painkillers clouding her mind. He could only assume that her cheerful mood was a disguise for what clearly was fucking crippling pain. “I love you, Nic’la, but sometimes you’re really fucking thick,” he said.

Nicola let out a weak chuckle. “I love you, Malcolm, but sometimes you’re really fucking annoying.”

He traced his fingers down her arm until he reached her hand, and took it into his. She looked around at him and, despite the obvious pain in her expression, she smiled. The Nicola who came out into the world last year, when she had lost a child and her marriage disintegrated, was back. Gone was the Nicola of the past month, who lost control and grappled for sanity. This Nicola was the one who made fucking sure everyone she loved pulled through the hardest of times. She was the backbone of this whole family. It only made the thought of losing her more terror-inducing.

“I’m going to have to tell the kids, aren’t I?” she mumbled. “Ella’s too much like Katie – this isn’t something she’s going to let go. She knows I was sick on Boxing Day, too.” Malcolm lifted her hand with his and kissed it gently. “But I don’t want to make her miserable.”

“Ella’s tougher than you think,” Malcolm reminded Nicola. “I think we should tell Ella tonight, since she’s only gonna worry herself into a frenzy, but keep it quiet from everyone else until after New Year.”

Nicola nodded and tried to get to her feet. She failed. Malcolm put his arms around her and carried most of her weight as she stumbled into a halfway upright position. He flushed the toilet while Nicola washed her hands, then guided her to their bedroom. She sat down on the bed. Malcolm found her painkillers, got her another tumbler of water and handed them to her. “Take them. Please, Nic’la.”

She sighed and opened the boxes. “I thought I could take the pain but I’m too fucking weak.”

Malcolm lifted her chin so that she looked at him. “You’ve lasted past nine at night. I wouldn’t call that weak.” Nicola smiled. “I’ll go and get Ella, alright?”

When he found Ella, she was in the kitchen, her hand on a bottle of vodka. “Don’t you fucking dare, my girl,” he growled, taking the bottle from her. “Why would you want to drink this?” he demanded. “Hmm?”

“James used to do it when he got upset,” she said. She still refused to call her father by anything but his given name.

“James also got drunk and tried to kill your mother,” Malcolm reminded her. “James won’t get out of jail for years because he got drunk and lost his fucking head, Ella.” He put the bottle back down on the counter. “You are too young, too smart, too funny, too beautiful to fall down that hole. Promise me you won’t do that again. Promise me, Ella.”

“I promise,” she said. He didn’t need to ask if she meant it; he knew she did. “Is Mum okay?”

Malcolm hesitated. He almost didn’t want to tell her now. But if he had learned anything, knowing the truth – however ugly it might be – was better than letting the imagination dream up a horror story that might not even hold any truth at all. “Come upstairs, Ella,” he sighed, his hand on her back. “We’ve got something we need to tell you.”

She followed him to the bedroom, where she sat next to her mother on the edge of the bed. Malcolm sat on Ella’s other side, while Nicola shot him a look asking for help. Nicola might be designed for survival, and keeping other people alive with her, but she was not designed for breaking bad news. She had all but proven that in the way she had avoided telling Malcolm and then threw her medication at him in the middle of fucking Dundee.

“What’s wrong?” Ella asked.

“Ella,” Malcolm sighed, looking at Nicola. Why wasn’t she saying anything? “I…” He wanted to say that he didn’t know how to tell her, but he knew that was a lie. He knew the best way, perhaps the _only_ way was to just come out and fucking say it. But he just didn’t want to do that.

Nicola touched Ella’s arm. “I don’t want you to panic, okay? There’s no need to panic. It’s all under control.”

“If it was all under control, you wouldn’t be telling me not to panic,” Ella replied sharply.

Nicola groaned; Malcolm knew she was currently cursing the mental acuity her daughter had most definitely not inherited from her. “Look, Ella,” she sighed. “I’m ill. I have been for a while, but I’ve been hiding it from everyone.”

All the colour drained from Ella’s face. “What is it?”

Nicola opened her mouth, but didn’t seem to be able to get the words out. Malcolm took Ella by the hand. “Your mum has cancer, Ella,” he said quietly.

Maybe it was the shock. Or the fear. Or just _that_ word.

Ella broke down into tears.

Nicola put her arm around her daughter and held her close. Malcolm got down onto his knees in front of Ella, and gently took her hand from her face. “Ella, look at me,” he said. To his surprise, she actually did. It terrified Malcolm that she was putting all her trust in him. “I know it’s scary. But Mum’s taking tablets to make it smaller, then she’s gonna go for an operation and they’ll cut it out, okay?”

“Then why was she sick just now?!”

“Because she was very silly,” Malcolm glared at Nicola, “and didn’t take one of her tablets. That’s all. And on Boxing Day, it was because one of her other tablets made her sick.” He squeezed Ella’s hand and stroked her hair away from her face.

Nicola kissed Ella’s head. “I won’t make promises, darling,” she said. Finally, it seemed Nicola had accepted there was no way to know whether or not she would survive. “All I can promise is that I’m getting the best help there is. I’ve got some amazing people looking after me, and they’ll do everything they can to make sure I’m okay.”

“And the only promise I can make,” Malcolm added, “is that, no matter what happens, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll always be here to look after you and Sophie and Ben.”

“But you’ve got your own daughter-”

“I have three daughters,” Malcolm interjected sternly. “And a son. I will never choose Bella over you and I will never choose you over Bella. As far as I know, a good dad doesn’t choose one child over the other, does he?”

Ella shook her head. “You don’t want me to tell anyone else, do you?” she sniffed.

“We’re going to tell Ben, Sophie and Bella after New Year,” Nicola explained. “We just didn’t want you to spend the whole night trying to work out why I was sick.”

Ella dried her eyes on her sleeve and said, “Okay. Okay. I’m okay.” She pushed her frizzy hair behind her ears and smiled. “I won’t tell anyone.”

“Are you sure you’re alright?” Nicola asked.

Ella smiled. “Yes. I’m okay, Mum, I promise.” She took a breath and added, “Can I go back to the party?”

“Of course, sweetheart, if that’s what you want to do,” Nicola replied.

Ella kissed her mother’s cheek and fleetingly hugged Malcolm, before she bounded down the stairs back into the middle of the party. He didn’t really know what to make of her; her initial reaction was almost to be expected, but she recovered remarkably quickly, even by Ella’s incredibly high standards of resilience.

“Oh, God,” moaned Nicola, her head resting on her hand. “My poor little girl. I’ve put her through so much in the last year and a half as it is.”

“You didn’t put her through anything,” Malcolm said, sitting down next to Nicola. “Katie died in an accident. That was nothing to do with you. The hell James put her through was James’ doing, not yours. And if you try and tell me it’s your fault you’ve got cancer, so help me, I’ll fucking-”

“Maybe not, Malcolm, but I still expect far too much of her! She’s not an adult!”

“No, but she’s stronger than anybody ever gives her any fucking credit for!” He chose not to tell her that Ella had briefly contemplated drinking vodka; he really believed Ella wouldn’t do it again, and he was more than capable of keeping an eye on their girl himself.

She sighed and rested her head on his chest, her arms wrapped around him. “Maybe you’re right.”

Malcolm held her close, thinking about her behaviour of recent months. He knew he should have paid more attention; he should have seen that she was struggling more than ever with DoSAC, and he should have taken that interview fuck up for the red flag it was. Nicola always made an effort to sound like she was neither racist nor sexist, and would not have allowed herself to fuck that up unless there was something wrong.

It hit him now that part of the reason she had accepted his link to Bella so readily was that, knowing she was ill, she was probably relieved there was someone else Malcolm could lean on if ever she was gone. He didn’t dismiss what she had said – that he had a past just as she did – but he understood now why she didn’t fight with him or demand he keep Bella away. Indeed, she had made every effort to welcome Bella into her family, rather than simply segregate her as Malcolm’s family.

“The painkillers are kicking in,” murmured Nicola. “I think I can stand properly.” The living room door opened, and the music travelled with ease up to them. Nicola laughed a little despairingly. “Thank fuck our neighbours are out.”

Malcolm smiled slightly, and stood up, his hand outstretched. “Let’s see if you can dance,” he said. “Not that you ever could,” he added, earning a glare from Nicola, “but let’s see if the painkillers are doing the job.”

Nicola rolled her eyes and got halfway to her feet before groaning slightly. He helped her stand up straight and took her into his embrace, leading her slowly. “… _and if all we’ve got is what no-one can break; I know I love you; if that’s all we can take; the tears are coming down; they’re mixing with the rain; I know I love you; if that’s all we can take_ …”

“Malcolm,” Nicola whispered. “If I do die-”

“Nicola-”

“No, listen,” she ordered him, her tone taking on a certain firmness she usually reserved for her children. “If I die, I want the same song as Katie at my funeral. And I want to be buried with her.”

When he eventually looked down at her, he found she was quietly crying. He wiped her tears away with his thumb and gently kissed her. “Of course,” he replied. “I’ll make sure that’s what will happen. But Nic’la,” he added, “let’s not live on the assumption you’re going to die. I’ve only been doing that a week and look what it’s done to me.”

She nodded her head and bit her lip, and Malcolm’s heart broke. He knew Nicola. She was strong – far stronger than he was – but she needed to cry in order to stay so strong. She was holding it back from him, and he knew she thought he couldn’t handle it when he was barely keeping a grip on himself. He gently pulled her lip from under her teeth with his thumb. He could almost see it rising through her as her hands began to tremble and her breathing lost its steady pace. “I’m sorry,” she choked. “I’m sorry we even need to have that conversation.”

Nicola put her hands over her face to stifle the sob that ripped through her body, hunched over under the weight of her own mortality. Malcolm hugged her tight and let her cry, wishing all the while that she didn’t have to endure this. If he knew Nicola at all, he knew the guilt of people she loved having to see her at her weakest, and the guilt that came with the idea her children might have to bury her, was what crippled her. She was Nicola Murray – the physical pain and her own welfare were nowhere near the top of the list of things causing this distress.

He felt her weight drop downwards and realised her knees must have gone weak. He hoisted her up and let her stand on his feet. She had not cried like this in a long time. This was as bad as Katie’s funeral. Her body was becoming tense, and he couldn’t hear or feel her letting her breath out. “Nicola,” he said softly into her ear, “Nic’la, you’re going to have to try and calm down.” Her arms meandered around his body. “You’ll work yourself into a panic attack.” He had a horrible suspicion, however, that she was already there.

Malcolm rubbed her back, hoping it might give Nicola something to focus on, but it did no good. He could hear her gasping for air. “Exhale,” he told her. But she didn’t. He sat her down on the bed and got on his knees in front of her. “Nicola, look at me. Look me in the eyes,” he ordered her. She looked up at him, full of fear and desolation. “Right now, in this moment, you are okay. You are safe. The kids are all down stairs getting fucking high on E-numbers,” he smiled. “The only thing I need you to do is _breathe out_.”

It was with a great deal of relief that he watched her chest deflate; she was out of the woods on this front, at least.

Nicola calmed down very slowly, though her hands still shook. Malcolm wondered why he didn’t abandon her. After all, when he first met her, he probably would have walked away from this sort of mess in a heartbeat. But that was before he knew the woman who existed underneath the panic attacks and the claustrophobia and the political ineptitude, and certainly before he discovered how much he loved that woman.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“Don’t,” he said, trailing a thumb down her face. “Don’t apologise.” She gave him a small smile. “What?” he demanded.

Her smile grew a little wider. “You realise you used to tell me I was mental for being claustrophobic and having panic attacks? You’re…” she trailed away, no doubt searching for the right words. “You never were that heartless bastard, were you?” Malcolm looked down and rested his hands on Nicola’s denim-clad knees. “When Katie died, you insisted that nobody else told me. You _wanted_ to do it. Glenn told me. He said you made Julius distract me from my phone until I got to you. You didn’t want Terri to pass on James’ message, and you didn’t want James to tell me.”

Malcolm closed his eyes. Why was she raking over all this?

“And when Mum gave you the option to distance yourself, you didn’t do it, Malcolm. You never were heartless,” she asserted. Her smile vanished. “And now I’m breaking your heart. I can see it in your eyes.” She was holding in tears again. It all came back to her tendency to love with everything she had; it gave her the most uncomfortable insight into those she loved, and when their hearts broke, so did hers. That was why Malcolm always tried not to be heartbroken. And if he was, he tried to conceal it.

He helped her back to her feet, not particularly in the mood to answer her observation, and kissed her. Her tears fell down his face, hot against his skin, as she passionately kissed him back. If nothing else, Malcolm reckoned, it was a good distraction for her. He didn’t want her to spend Hogmanay torturing herself. He wanted to dance with her, laugh with her, kiss her, hold her. He wanted the kids to have their mother and Victoria to have her daughter. They were not like him. They only knew one version of Nicola. They did not know every part of her as he did.

Nicola turned the makeshift wedding ring on his finger and smiled into his lips. She still could not stem the flow of tears, but the idea that, albeit unofficially, they were now married seemed to comfort her.

He pulled back and let her face lean against his cheek. “Shall we go back downstairs?” she asked.

“I think we should,” he said. “Who knows what swear words Jamie’s teaching the children?” Nicola chuckled, but did not move. Her tears still fell, and she still trembled. In all honesty, he was amazed she had lasted this long before breaking down; it seemed to be that telling Ella the truth was more painful to Nicola than the disease itself. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she whispered. Her hand crept onto his face and pressed her cheek against his. For the first time, she outright confessed, “I’m scared, Malcolm.”

Malcolm closed his eyes, his hand holding Nicola close by the crook of the neck. “I know, Nic’la,” he murmured. “I know.” He stroked her hair with the other hand. “Can you walk?”

“I think so, yeah,” she answered him. “But I might need help on the stairs. The painkillers are working but I’m stiff.”

“Okay,” Malcolm said.

He let her lead the way, and came to her side when she got to the top of the stairs, his arm around her waist as he took her hand. When she said she was stiff, she wasn’t fucking kidding. Her body must have been incredibly tense for it to now be so rigid that she struggled to get down the stairs, and for it to have been so tense, Nicola had to have been in immense pain. All day, she hadn’t said a bloody word about it, and probably would have held her silence had it not caused her to vomit in front of Ella.

At the foot of the stairs, Nicola stopped and closed her eyes. “I don’t know what to do, Malcolm,” she whispered. “I’m scared they all know something’s wrong.”

“They probably do,” he admitted. “They just heard you scream and Ella call for help.”

“Tell me what to do, Malcolm,” she said. “Please. Just tell me what I can do.”

He turned and looked at her, his hands on her waist. “Bravery isn’t a lack of fear. It’s being scared out of your fucking mind and facing it anyway,” he said to her as he planted a kiss onto her forehead. “Be brave.”


	20. The Hanging Man

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It is now a shit week. A hugely fucking shit week. But this was written before this week turned into the fucking Loch Laggan-sized pool of shit it now is.
> 
> This is the second to last chapter. First chapter of the next on is already planned. You're going to fucking hate me.

Jamie ambushed Malcolm as soon as he got Nicola settled back into the party. He was drunk – _very_ drunk – but still understandable. “So is Nicola on fucking chemo or-”

“Fucking shut up!” hissed Malcolm. He pulled Jamie by the arm, out of the way of everyone else. “The kids don’t know yet!” he informed Jamie once they were out of everyone else’s earshot. “The last thing I need is Ben and Sophie finding out from a fucking drunken idiot!”

Jamie squinted at him. “You okay?”

Malcolm let out an incredulous and sarcastic laugh. “Yeah,” he replied. “Yeah, Jamie, everything’s fucking grand, mate! My daughter fucking nearly got herself killed and my wife has fucking cancer, and we’re fucking about trying to fucking hide that from everyone – which, by the way, is pretty fucking difficult when she doesn’t take her fucking painkillers! My fucking sister has turned up out of the fucking blue; my fucking brother-in-law decided to be a racist cunt at the dinner table. I’ve got six fucking kids running about the place, one of whom has just been told her mother has a potentially fatal disease,” he ranted, “and two of whom choose to speak everything but fucking English! My mother-in-law’s convinced I’ve landed myself with depression and is always breathing down my fucking neck. You’re pished, and Adam and Bella are not fucking far behind you-”

“Malcolm!” Jamie interrupted. “Calm down, mate!”

He hadn’t noticed himself getting angry until Jamie stopped him rambling. This was the anger problem Verity had insisted he had, wasn’t it? He never realised it was happening until it was already done. Malcolm sat down on the stairs. If this was the state of him now, how was he going to cope when, like Victoria pointed out the Nicola, the really fucking ugly stuff started? And if, heaven forbid, Nicola did die, how was he going to raise three children on his own if he couldn’t even handle this?

“What are the kids doing?” he asked, just to break the silence.

“Making posters of the words of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, since half of this lot won’t know anything but the fucking chorus,” Jamie grinned. “Erin’s idea. She’s a great wee lassie.”

“As mad as her mother, you mean,” Malcolm snorted.

“Well, that, too,” replied Jamie, sitting down next to him. “I wouldn’t cross Verity, that’s for sure.”

“I used to,” Malcolm mumbled, wringing his hands. “Never came off worse for it. Never came off any fucking better, either.” He looked around at Jamie. “Do you think I’ve got an anger management problem?”

“Malc, if you’ve got an anger management problem, I should be in a fucking padded cell,” Jamie reasoned.

Malcolm smiled slightly. “Fair comment.”

“You’ve gone around Whitehall terrorising everyone for years, Malcolm,” said Jamie. “You didn’t think you had a fucking problem then. What’s changed?”

“Something Verity said,” Malcolm answered vaguely.

Jamie sighed. “I think the more important question here is do _you_ think you’ve got an anger management problem?”

Malcolm glared at him for daring to ask his opinion on his own psyche. It was almost amusing to be asked to be objective about his own reactions to life’s obstacles. If he didn’t think it was proportionate to fly off the handle, he wouldn’t fucking do it. But it always did seem proportionate.

What had Nicola accused him of, the very first day they met? “Fucking out of proportion, Israeli-style response,” Malcolm recited under his breath. It hadn’t been a manifestation of rage that caused her to say that, but he had taken drastic action.

“A man walks into a pub,” Jamie began, “and he asks for a glass of water. The barman hauls out this massive fuck-off shotgun, aims and pulls the trigger. He misses the man by inches. The man thanks this barman who just about blew his fucking head off, leaves a tip and walks out. Why?”

Malcolm stared at Jamie. “Have you lost the fuck-”

“Just fucking think about it, Malcolm,” Jamie cut him off.

Malcolm did think about it, and it made no fucking sense to thank someone for firing a shotgun at the head, never mind leave a tip. There was no reason to reward someone for dishing out fear. Unless, of course, fear was the one thing that was needed. He smiled slightly as the answer dawned on him. “The man had the hiccups. The barman scared the shit out of him and it got rid of it quicker than fucking about with a glass of water.”

Jamie chuckled. “Exactly. And that’s what you do, Malcolm. You bypass the glass of water and go straight for the shotgun. It usually fucking works.”

“But at what fucking cost?”

“Is this you developing a conscience?” Jamie laughed.

“Maybe,” Malcolm sighed. “Verity, she…she brought up some stuff that happened when I was a teenager, and she thinks I might end up like that again. Beating people up for no reason. Tearing the next person down the food chain to fucking shreds because I can’t handle my own anger.”

As he said it, he recalled, for the first time in decades, the image of a twelve-year-old Verity Tucker, cowering in the corner of the school shelter, her lip bleeding and her wrists bruised. He remembered when Verity had left school, when her certificates came through, he leaned in to give her a hug and kiss her cheek; she flinched. She didn’t stop flinching for years, every time he came within a foot of her or moved his hands unexpectedly. Even when she graduated university, nearly ten years after the last time Malcolm ever hit her, she recoiled ever so slightly when he threw his arm around her for a photograph. It had taken Verity so long to really trust him not to harm her again, and he had chosen to ignore all the indicators, because he liked to think he was wholeheartedly forgiven for any wrongdoing. He had been. But it was forgiven, not forgotten.

Had he not done the same to Nicola on Boxing Day? When he shouted at her for being upset by the idea that the whole world might find out she was ill before she felt able to tell them? He hadn’t hit her, but he vividly remembered the desire to hit her. And last night, when he lost that screw, he had kicked the sideboard and thrown chairs over in response.

And the day he worked out who Bella really was…but that wasn’t anger, was it? He was angry, yes, but it had been more than that. It had been shock, pain, love, fear…everything he was capable of feeling.

“I don’t have an anger management problem,” he realised. He looked around at Jamie, who didn’t seem to judge what he was saying. “I’ve got an emotion management problem.”

Jamie laughed quietly. “Don’t we all?”

“I don’t see you turning your office fucking upside down,” Malcolm grumbled. “Or shouting at your dying wife.”

“She’s not dying, Malcolm,” Jamie insisted. “Don’t call it that unless there’s nothing anyone can do to save her. Right now, they’re trying to fucking save her, aren’t they?”

Malcolm ignored Jamie. “I don’t see you beating the living shit into your wee sister, either,” he mumbled. He turned to find an ill-disguised look of horror upon Jamie’s face. “When my dad died,” Malcolm whispered hoarsely, “I was…I didn’t know how to deal with it. Nobody tried to help me fucking deal with it. I took it out on Verity. She was fucking terrified of me, Jamie.”

“How did your dad die?” Jamie asked curiously. Malcolm understood the curiosity; though they were as close to best mates as Malcolm was ever likely to achieve, Jamie knew very little about Malcolm’s life before London. “Sorry,” he immediately backtracked. “That was fucking insensitive.”

Malcolm stared in front of him, looking through the windows of the front door and into the darkness beyond. “It was a Sunday morning,” Malcolm said quietly. “I’d been out partying with one of my cousins; I was fucking hungover. Didn’t get up ‘til eleven. Mum was working, doing a double shift. She was a nurse at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. She’d been called in on the Saturday night because the ward sister and two nurses were all down with the same virus, but Mum _always_ did Sundays. Got her out of going to church, and there were plenty of nurses who’d rather have Sundays off,” he smiled. “If anything, it meant they could get pissed on Saturdays.”

“I can see the appeal,” Jamie smiled.

“I went looking for Dad. Mum always thought he cracked down on me when I drank at weekends but really he gave me sympathy and a full Scottish breakfast,” grinned Malcolm. “I looked everywhere. I checked the bedroom, thinking he might be rough as fuck with a hangover too, but he wasn’t there. Eventually, I went to check the shed. He had this shed where he had a table saw and stuff. He liked to build things. The door was unlocked, so I opened it,” Malcolm recounted, a lump growing in his throat. “And he was just…” he hesitated, reaching out and creating an outline with his hands. “Just hanging there. At first I thought he’d hanged himself, but then I saw the bullet hole in his head. Gun was lying on the floor. The police reckoned he’d shot himself, but set himself up to hang if he missed, or bottled it.” He felt Jamie rub his shoulder, and realised he had let himself shed tears. “Fuck,” he muttered, wiping his face. “Sorry.”

Jamie replied, “You’ve never told anyone that, have you?”

“I told the police when they came fucking knocking,” Malcolm said.

“No, Malcolm, I mean told anyone properly,” Jamie sighed. “Have you told Nicola?”

“Yeah, ‘cause that’s really what Nicola fucking needs,” snapped Malcolm. “Fuck, Jamie, why did you have to ask?”

“Because it was about time somebody did.”

The living room door opened and Sophie, Ella and Erin ran towards them with A3 sheets of paper. “Look, Uncle Malkie!” Erin shouted excitedly. “Look!”

Malcolm looked over the sheets of paper, finding all the words to ‘Auld Lang Syne’ written with thick blue marker, entirely in Scots. Malcolm laughed. “Christ, Nic’la’s brain might explode,” he chuckled, showing Jamie.

“Jesus, I can’t wait for fucking midnight,” he sniggered.

“Well done, girls,” Malcolm praised them. “Come and we’ll stick them up.” He got to his feet and went back to the noise of the living room, sifting through the sideboard drawer.

Bella came up beside him. “What ye rakin’ for?” she asked happily. She was drunk, but in good spirits, seemingly recovering well from her brush with severe hypothermia.

“Blue tack,” he replied. Where the fuck was it? Why was it whenever he looked for something in this fucking house it was never where it was fucking supposed to be? “Fuck’s sake!” he snarled, infuriated by the lack of fucking organisation. “This fucking house-”

“Oh, calm down, Malcolm,” Bella giggled.

“Shut the fuck up,” he barked, slamming the drawer shut and opening the next one. He ignored the hurt expression on her face, focused solely on finding what he needed to put his daughters and niece’s efforts up where they needed to be. He dragged objects out of the drawer and discarded them on the floor.

Why couldn’t he find it? The simplest of fucking objects, and he couldn’t fucking find it. “Malcolm?” Bella asked, no trace of a laugh in her voice. “Malcolm?!” He continued emptying the drawers, his stomach tightening into a knot – he felt sick. “Dad!” Bella shouted.

He didn’t turn. The instinct to destroy, to scatter the chaos, started to take over. It didn’t stop because the children could see, or because his mother-in-law would surely insist he see a doctor as soon as possible, or because his wife would surely be scared. It stopped because he found what he was looking for. He took the sheets of paper from Jamie and started to stick them to the wall. Once he’d completed the task he set out to do, the panic set in when he saw that he’d emptied the contents of the sideboard onto the floor.

He needed air that wasn’t polluted by the smell of pastry, chocolate and alcohol.

Malcolm stormed out of the room, out the front door and into the cold December night air. He turned in a circle, looking around him at the streetlights; the snow fell onto his face, hindering his senses. But in the orange glow of streetlights, he saw the silhouette of a hanging man, suspended in the air by nothing. He stumbled backwards off the pavement in fright. He had blocked that image out most of his life – he had lived longer without his father than he lived with him – so why was his dad dangling hanged in a street in London?

With every step back he took, the dead man followed.

He closed his eyes, counted to ten, and willed it to disappear.

“Malcolm!” Nicola’s voice echoed through the frozen air. “Malcolm, it’s fucking freezing! Get back inside!”

He opened his eyes.

All he saw was his father’s pale, lifeless face, eyes vacant, blood dried on his face from the bullet hole in his temple. Those empty eyes – the same blue as Verity’s, as Bella’s – stared into his soul.

A bright white light approached, reflecting off the snow that lay all around, and a horn gave a screeching blare. A hand dragged him by the shirt, into a familiar pair of arms.

“You idiot!” Nicola hissed into his ear. “You could’ve got yourself fucking killed!” He let Nicola take him back into the house, and sat him down in a dining room chair. Victoria loitered by the door. “Mum, can you check him over?” Nicola asked. “I know he won’t go to A and E, and Christ knows they could do without another patient on New Year’s Eve.”

Malcolm was all too painfully aware that his hands shook, even when Nicola held them tight.

“Malcolm,” Victoria said, approaching with no caution at all. “Malcolm, where are you?”

“At home,” he answered. Why was she asking stupid questions?

“What month is it?”

“December,” he said. He looked at his watch. “But only for another hour and fourteen minutes.”

“Can you tell me the names for everyone under the age of thirty-five in this house?” she asked.

Malcolm glared at her. “Are you fucking serious?” he snapped.

“Deadly serious, my boy.”

“Euan, Bella, Eilidh and Alasdair Whyte,” he reeled off. “Ella, Sophie and Ben Murray. Erin Crichton. Aoife Hannigan.”

“Well, he knows where he is, and who he’s with,” Victoria surmised. “Malcolm, did you stand in front of that car deliberately?”

“No!” Malcolm said. “Fucking hell, Victoria, no!”

The two women shared a look, though he could tell from Nicola’s face that she did believe him when he said he hadn’t been trying to kill himself. He honestly hadn’t been trying to do that. He had only wanted some air, some breathing space to get him out of that state of frustration and panic he had got himself into…after that, he didn’t know what had gone wrong. That had never happened before, and he could only hope it never did again.

Victoria checked his eyes. “Any headaches, Malcolm?”

“No. For fuck’s sake, Victoria, I’m alright! I went out for some air, stumbled backwards and ended up on the fucking road. That’s all!”

“Maybe go easy on the drink,” she advised. “And try not to get too uptight,” she added with a frown. She rested a hand on his head in an almost maternal sort of way. “And, please, go to the doctor after the New Year. None of us want you to suffer, dear boy.”

Malcolm sighed. “Yes,” he said. “Yeah, I’ll go.”

Satisfied, Victoria ruffled his hair lightly and left him with Nicola.

Nicola pulled her chair closer to him, resting her hands on his thigh. “What’s changed?” she asked. “Why are you agreeing to go to the doctor?”

Malcolm pinched the bridge of his nose, the adrenaline waning from his system. “Because I just got the fright of my fucking life, Nic’la.”

“What are you talking about?” Nicola said gently. “What happened out there, Malcolm? You looked like you’d seen a fucking ghost.”

Malcolm let out a short, bitter laugh. He was in a corner, and he _had_ to tell her the truth. If speaking of what he found in that shed as a boy did that to him, he had to let Nicola know. There was no way out of it now. The box was open, and he couldn’t close it, but he couldn’t leave it open without letting Nicola see inside. “You know I was speaking to Jamie on the stairs?” Malcolm asked.

“Yeah.”

“He asked me what happened when my dad died.”

“Ah,” Nicola sighed.

Malcolm put his face into his hands and groaned. “I told him. I fucking spoke about it, didn’t I?” Nicola’s fingers stroked the back of his neck; how did she know that calmed his nerves? “I couldn’t find the blue tack and I got wound up, so when I did find it, I put the paper up and fucked off outside for some air. And-” he said, but he stopped himself when he realised how fucking crazy it sounded. But, this was Nicola, who would not give up. They already had depression and cancer making their relationship difficult – they did not need another secret festering between them. “I saw him hanging there.”

“You said your dad shot himself.”

“He did,” Malcolm said. “But he hanged, too. He tied himself up then shot himself. He really fucking wanted to die. The police said he did that to make sure he died even if he missed with the gun.”

Nicola kissed his head, still tickling the back of his neck with her fingers. “Oh, Malcolm,” she sighed. “I’m so sorry, my love.”

“Not your fault,” he reminded her.

“I know,” she assured him. “But you’re my husband. I love you and I’ll say anything that I think might make you feel even marginally better.”

“You know we’re not actually fucking married, right?” Malcolm asked, finally looking around at her.

She smiled. “Oh, don’t burst my bubble!” He stood up and went to the kitchen; he poured himself some vodka and drank it straight, letting it sting his throat as he swallowed. “Mum said to go easy on that.”

“Dutch courage,” he explained. “Since I’ve got to go back into a room full of people who just watched me lose the plot.”

“They see you lose the plot on a daily basis,” she told him. “You’re always shouting and swearing, usually about how you’re going to fucking murder every Cabinet minister that dares look at you.” Malcolm glared at her. She was playing stupid now, and he really wished she wouldn’t. Nicola might have been a bit dim when it came to the common sense of what she was meant to say and do as a politician, but she wasn’t emotionally unintelligent. “Alright, so they saw you at your worst. But that room is full of your family and friends. All they want is for you to be okay, Malcolm. They’re not laughing at you, and they don’t think you’re crazy. They’re a bit worried about you, yeah, but they’re not judging you.”

Nicola grabbed his hand and rubbed her thumb over the back of it.

“Did you hear what Bella called you?” she asked.

“Yeah,” grumbled Malcolm. “But she was just trying to get my attention, that’s all.”

“If that’s what you want to tell yourself.”

Malcolm walked away to the living room, back into the social minefield. Nobody stared. Nobody shied away from him. Everyone asked if he was okay, and accepted his answer when he said he was. When Nicola joined him, he could feel her keep an extremely fucking close eye on him, but he had expected no less from her. Of course she was going to watch him like a hawk – he would have done the same to her if she had said she saw a hallucination of her dead father.

This was a game of pushing and pulling, Malcolm reminded himself as he put his arm around Nicola’s waist and struck up a conversation with Aoife, Verity and Bella. They were bound to fall down sometimes, and that was okay – as long as they stuck around to help each other up again.


	21. Auld Lang Syne

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I HAVE BROADBAND. SSE DIDN'T FUCK ABOUT.
> 
> This is the final chapter of this. Please don't thump me for it. The next part of it will be in a new story, of which I've almost finished the first chapter.
> 
> And aye, I am indeed up at 5am like a bairn at Christmas because they switched my WiFi on. Let me have my small pleasures.

Nicola stuck to Malcolm like a tattoo. She was tired – he could tell from the way she started to use him as an anchor – but alert. More alert than was totally convenient. Bella was watching him like he was a grenade with the pin halfway out, just waiting for something to knock it all the way; she was perfectly pleasant and affectionate, and if not for those vivid blue eyes, he would never have known she was concerned.

Malcolm, however, could not rid himself of the vision of those same eyes and their dead stare. Every time he so much as blinked, they were there to haunt him. He didn’t know how much more of that he could take; he said nothing more about it to Nicola, for her could not worry her. The sensible voice in his head told him to tell Verity or – even better – Victoria. After all, Victoria had decades of experience in fucking Emergency Departments dealing with men just like him. She had probably seen this before. And that was the very reason he couldn’t tell her. What if the consultant in her kicked into action and she forced him into a hospital? He couldn’t risk that.

And Verity, well, she might do the same. She would never risk losing her brother when she had a father who committed suicide – even if that meant going against his wishes. He didn’t have a single doubt that she would rather have him hate her than have him dead.

He could tell Bella, but Bella was loud. She was not even capable of being quiet, and he knew she probably never had been. If he turned to Euan or Aoife, they would only turn to Bella for help. If he turned to Adam – even if he was stupid enough to ask that halfwit for help – he would only alert Verity. Jamie was too drunk; he might panic and tell Nicola. He had been the one who implied he should have been telling Nicola everything that happened when he was young. Obviously, telling any one of the children was out of the question.

So Malcolm detached himself from Nicola; she gave him a frown but returned to her conversation with Aoife after he pressed a kiss into her lips and forced a smile. There were only another nine minutes until midnight, but they were nine minutes Malcolm couldn’t find a way to endure. He went upstairs – via the kitchen, where he swiped a half-full bottle of whisky – and locked himself in the bathroom, where nobody could ask anything of him.

But there was plenty Malcolm asked – demanded – of himself.

Be a good father. Be a good husband. Be a good brother. Be a good friend. Don’t let anyone fuck the government up, including the wife, daughter and friends.

Be fierce. Be intelligent. Be ruthless. Let everyone see the devilment.

But be kind. Be understanding. Be passionate. Let only those held dearest see the humanity.

Be everything. Be more than was achievable.

Be impossible.

Be impossible in an impossible world, and the world _might_ just become possible. The people in that world might become comprehensible, and it might be possible to get through to them when they needed it. And maybe, just maybe, even Malcolm Tucker could be loved.

Wasn’t that what he needed most, all these years?

And now, it was more pain than it surely could ever be worth.

Love was meant to be joyful. It was meant to be the wedding without the underlying notion of death, and the laughter without the fear of what it might hide. How could this love be so excruciatingly painful? More to the point, how could Malcolm have come to love another person so much that the fear of her death paralysed him?

He had not allowed himself to love like that, deeper than the surface, since he loved his father to the very ends of the Earth and had the man torn from him in brutal fashion. How could he not have known what was going on with his own father? Malcolm’s dad had been reactionary, bad tempered, and a heavy drinker, but always had been. He came from a whole family of drinkers, and it was Glasgow in the seventies, for fuck’s sake. Malcolm hadn’t seen any difference in his normal behaviour; what bothered him was that he was sixteen and old enough to know better. Verity was only eleven when Dad died, and Mum was working herself into the ground in the NHS during the period it was being overhauled in Scotland. His only real stress was school and the occasional drunken scrap. He had no real excuse. He should have seen it coming.

Malcolm leaned his head back against the bath and took a swig of whisky. He wished he had never said a word about any of it; now he had spoken of it, he couldn’t forget it.

Truth be told, he wasn’t sure he wanted to forget it. He certainly hadn’t forgiven himself. He was fucking stupid not to have noticed what was happening. But then, he was good at failing to notice what was happening to those closest to him. He hadn’t noticed Nicola was depressed, or that she had fucking cancer. How had he not seen it? How had he missed all those little clues?

He wanted to break something, but he couldn’t bring himself to destroy the house, for it would only stress Nicola out. He wanted to hurt something, someone, but knew he couldn’t force his pain onto anyone else. Not again. He would not repeat that mistake.

The only person he could do that to was himself. He could take the bruises. He could take whatever physical manifestation of uncontrollable emotion he produced.

Malcolm got clumsily to his feet and searched the bathroom cabinet until he found a packet of disposable razors; they were Nicola’s, but a blade was a blade, whether its handle was pink or black. He pulled his shirt up over his wrist and hesitated. Every sensible bone in his body told him this was a bad idea, but the overwhelming urge to destroy reminded him it was better to bring harm to himself than it was to force it upon anyone else.

He pulled off the plastic safety cover of the razor and pressed it hard into his wrist, about two inches from the heel of his hand, and dragged it downwards over the visible veins. Blood beaded to the surface; the knowledge that he had marred something otherwise unspoiled calmed him, as did the assurance that taking it out on himself alleviated the excess emotion as well as taking it out on anyone else. Perhaps it was actually more effective – at least this time, the person in harm’s way deserved to be there.

He repeated the action mercilessly, over and over again; every time, it hurt a little less, but that initial sting as he tore open his own skin never disappeared.

He had control over this. He had control of what broke his skin. There was no risk that he was about to harm someone else, and no risk that he might break something in the house. Finally, there was some discipline in his anger, fear and hurt. He was controlling something that happened to him, rather than just standing here, waiting for the universe to deliver its next body blow, never knowing where it might land. At least this way, he knew what was being done to him.

“Malcolm!” Nicola shouted, her knuckles rapping the door. “It’s two minutes to midnight, love!”

“Fuck,” he muttered. He pulled the sleeve over his wrist and binned the razor; he flushed the toilet as an excuse for leaving the party and washed the blood from his hands. When he opened the door, Nicola was smiling up at him, though he could tell she was still worried. To be fair, he would have been worried if she wasn’t worried, because then her sanity would have been in question.

Together they went downstairs, back to the living room. The room was lit only by candles and fairy lights, and the backlight of Aoife’s phone. It wasn’t dark, but it wasn’t bright. Aoife was busy lining the children up where they could see the posters on the wall, with Nicola at their side and Malcolm at hers, and Victoria on his other side.

“Ten,” Jamie shouted.

“Nine,” the rest of them joined him. “Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One!”

The kids let off those daft party poppers. Malcolm kissed Nicola and took her hand. “ _Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind_ ,” they sang, joined hand-in-hand into a circle of fifteen. “ _Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne_.”

Malcolm could feel something warm and wet on the base of his thumb.

“ _For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne; we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet for auld lang syne._ ”

It was blood. He tried to turn his hand, to convince it to trickle away from the path that would lead it to Nicola.

“ _And surely ye’ll be your pint-stoup! And surely I’ll be mine! And we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne_.”

He hazarded a glance down at his left hand; his thumb was over the back of Nicola’s hand.

“ _For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne; we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet for auld lang syne._ ”

The blood had dripped down to the bottom knuckle of his thumb, but gravity only pulled it faster.

“ _We twa hae run about the braes, and pou’d the gowans fine; but we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit, sin’ auld lang syne_.”

Nicola was busy reading the lyrics from the wall; being English, she probably had little idea what she was actually singing.

“ _For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne; we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet for auld lang syne._ ”

Malcolm felt the blood skew its course around his thumbnail, dangerously close to Nicola’s skin.

“ _We twa he paidl’d in the burn, frae morning sun till dine; but seas between us braid hae roar’d, sin’ auld lang syne_.”

Nicola looked down. Malcolm mirrored her, to find his blood had touched the back of her hand. He shot her a warning look and shook his head.

“ _For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne; we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet for auld lang syne._ ”

He watched horror spread over Nicola’s face, his eyes never leaving hers as they crossed their arms across their chests.

“ _And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere! And gie’s a hand o’ thine! And we’ll tak’ a right guid willie-waught, for auld lang syne_.”

Victoria did the same as Nicola, looking down as his thumb smeared blood onto her hand. Though visibly alarmed for only a moment, she did not let it show like her daughter did.

“ _For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne; we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet for auld lang syne._ ”

Everyone ran forwards, meeting in the middle of their circle; it was a pile up of hugs and handshakes and wishes of a Happy New Year. Malcolm ignored Nicola trying to catch his attention, choosing instead to embrace his children, his niece and his grandchildren. If he pretended that there was nothing for her to worry about, she might let it go.

Victoria, however, had other plans. She took Malcolm into a hug and whispered into his ear, “What have you done to yourself?”

He didn’t answer, but raised his arm at the elbow to ensure no blood dripped onto the floor.

Nicola was soon at his back, her hand guiding him out of the room, Victoria in front of them all the way to the kitchen. “You’re bleeding, Malcolm,” Nicola whispered.

“No shit, Sherlock,” he retorted.

Victoria pushed him into a chair and unbuttoned the now bloodstained cuff of his shirt; when she rolled it back, she exposed a pool of blood that continued to move its way down onto his hand. “Nicola,” sighed Victoria, “get me the first aid kit, wash your hands, and go back to the kids.”

“But-”

“If he needs stitches, I’ll take him to A and E, but I don’t think he will. I know it looks like a lot of blood, sweetheart, but I reckon it’s shallow enough for a clean out and a wound dressing,” Victoria said. She was in doctor-mode. Malcolm looked on in silence as Nicola glared at her mother but eventually relented and retrieved the first aid box from the cupboard above the fridge-freezer. “We’ll be okay, love. You go and keep them all out of here for now.”

Victoria poured TCP onto cotton wool as Nicola closed the door behind her. He hadn’t smelled that stuff since he was a kid, and he only now remembered what an assault it was on the sense of smell.

“This is going to sting like fuck, darling, but it’s got to be cleaned,” she told him. He winced as she pressed the soaked pad of cotton wool to his wrist. “What did you use?”

Malcolm stared at her, completely lost for words. What had he done? How was this better than any other option he had? Of course, it _was_ better than any of the other options currently in front of him, but how had he got to a stage where inflicting this upon himself was better than any other way he had of living with himself?

Victoria took the cotton wool away to reveal angry red incisions on his wrist that still oozed out small amounts of blood. “Razor?” she asked, wiping the blood off his thumb and his hand.

Malcolm nodded.

“I take it this isn’t a suicide attempt,” she commented, soaking another piece of cotton wool. “If you were trying to kill yourself, you’d be dead. Of that, I am sure.” She looked up at his face, and he saw her breaking down every barrier he had raised with that one piercing stare. “So that leaves me with one question: why did you do it, dear boy?”

“I…” he tried to answer, but he hesitated. What if she jumped to an extreme reaction? What if he was the man who walked into the pub, and she was the bartender firing the shotgun?

“You can tell me,” she urged him. “I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to. We don’t even need to go to the hospital just now; these aren’t deep. All they need is a dressing, and we have some of those here,” she said.

Malcolm paused a moment longer before he finally gave it up. “I needed to hurt something,” he murmured, “and I’d rather I get hurt than anyone fucking else. At least I’ve fucking earned it.”

Victoria unravelled a wound dressing. “I see. And why did you need to harm something, or someone?”

“Because I don’t fucking know what else to do,” he said. “My whole life has gone fucking mental. I’m always angry, or hurt, or fucking scared,” he added, gesturing wildly with his uninjured arm. “I don’t have control over a single fucking thing. I don’t even have a say in whether or not I see my fucking sister.”

“You’re not happy to have her here?” Victoria asked in surprise, laying the pad of the wound dressing over the injuries to his wrist. “You seemed to be getting on fine.”

“I am happy to see her,” he sighed. “Of course I am.”

“So,” she said as she wound the bandage around his wrist, “you’re not in control of how you feel. I bet that’s something you’re not used to. You were fucking bad enough when you discovered you couldn’t stop yourself from feeling love. Having the same problem with something like anger or fear must be difficult. But how does it get to this, Malcolm?” she asked him, nodded down at the wrist she was binding.

“One thought leads to another,” he replied. “Before I know what’s happened, it’s out of control.”

Victoria tied the bandage into a secure knot, cut the ends and stuck it down with medical tape. “That should be okay now,” she assured him. “It’ll hurt for a while, but it doesn’t need stitches or anything. Just keep it clean, okay?” He nodded; she reached out and placed a hand on his face, searching him for whatever it was she wanted to know. “And _no more alcohol_ ,” she added firmly. “All it does is take any control you do have away.”

She pulled his shirt back over his wrist but didn’t button the cuff. Instead, she went into the back room and opened the tumble dryer; in the festivities, they had all forgotten about the clothes Nicola shoved in there during the afternoon. Victoria returned with a sweater and handed it to him. “Nicola’s going to take Verity and Adam to their hotel, then she’s going to take Bella, Euan and Aoife home. Verity will come back over for the car tomorrow; their hotel is just down the road. Jamie’s going to sleep on the sofa and I’ll be in the spare room,” she explained to him. “None of them know about this, and Nicola and I won’t tell them.”

“Thanks,” he mumbled.

Nobody left until well past one o’clock. Verity, Adam and Erin bade him goodnight and a Happy New Year as they piled into Nicola’s car. Half an hour later, Bella, Euan, Aoife, Eilidh and a passed-out Alasdair did the same. Once they were gone, Malcolm said goodnight to Jamie, Victoria and the children – all of whom, by some miracle, had managed to stay awake the entire night – and went to the bedroom. He methodically undressed and the redressed into pyjamas, averting his gaze from the white bandage on his left wrist.

The bed was cold. Nicola’s side was empty.

He lay in the silence until he heard Nicola came back into the house and locked the door. He could hear the children scramble to bed; Nicola seemed to have given up on enforcing toothbrushing tonight, but insisted they get changed. Each of the children shouted goodnight through the house, receiving disjointed replies from anyone who was still awake, apart from Malcolm.

Nicola entered the room; Malcolm listened as she changed and took her tablets, and felt the mattress shift as her weight fell onto it. She shuffled close to him and put her arms around him, pressed his face into her chest. “I can take you to the doctor when the surgery opens on the third,” she promised him. “If you want me to come in with you, I will.”

She stroked his hair gently. Why was she doing this? Why wasn’t she freaking out like he was?

“It might be that you have to wrestle with this for the rest of your life. You might be like me. But even if there’s no getting rid of it, there are ways to learn to live with it, and battle the worst of it back. You need to fight, Malcolm. I need you to fight, and I will be here when you need me,” she promised him, her lips brushing against his head. “But, Malcolm, you have to let me in. I can’t help unless you tell me what the fuck is going on. I don’t want you to be in pain, my love. I want the best for you. We all do.”

He reacted by placing an arm around her waist.

“You’re mine,” she told him simply. “And I simply cannot be without you. I love you, so much. I need you to know that. Sometimes knowing one person loves you so much they can’t breathe without you is the one thing you have to cling on to, when everything else just hurts, and nothing makes any fucking sense,” she explained. “There are times knowing you love me has been the one thing that forced me not to give up.”

She lifted his face by the chin, their noses touching.

“I know you,” she reminded him. “I know you need love more than you’ll ever admit.”

Malcolm rested his hand on her hip, trying not to let her see that she knew him better than even she realised.

“Tell me what you need from me,” she whispered. “Tell me what we can do to get you through the night.”

She had said to him that he was her strength and her courage, and that he kept her afloat; did she have the faintest idea that she was doing the same for him, all the time? Did she know she was indispensable? Did she know she was the strongest person he had ever known?

The difference between them was that where she was solid steel, he was cast iron. Where she was strong but malleable, he was tough but brittle. She might get bent out of shape, but he splintered and snapped. They had the same base, but reacted differently to assault.

He was loud, violent and harsh. She was kind, resilient and soft. On paper, they had nothing in common. In reality, they balanced one another out. Somehow, they managed to raise children and they managed to keep their heads above water, until now.

Malcolm kissed Nicola, desperate to feel love that didn’t hurt like a stake to the heart. One untainted moment…he needed to feel that rush of love that wasn’t disfigured by fear and rage. He pushed his hand underneath her t-shirt, those familiar curves warm under his fingers. Malcolm, as she kissed him fervently, pushed out of his mind the fact that she had cancer, and that she was depressed, and that he was going out of his mind.

Nicola smiled into his lips. “There are worse ways to get through the night,” she remarked, tugging his body as she turned onto her back. Leaning over her, he took in every detail of her face under the dim illumination of the streetlight’s glow through the curtains. Even in semi-darkness, those wide eyes told a million stories, mostly of the way she loved without restraint.

And that capacity of Nicola’s, Malcolm realised as he pressed gentle kisses into her neck, was what was going to save him. He just had to allow it. She held the remedy to all manner of turmoil. She had the rational thinking to take him to the doctor, and the patience to remind him he was loved and needed.

Nicola was everything. Nicola was the key that could give him the strength to be impossible. Her love could help save him; Malcolm only had to find it in himself to let that love in. Whether or not he had the courage to bring down every wall, however…well, he was going to have to work on that.


End file.
